News

27 September 2010

 

VI Systems presents low-power-consumption 45G short-reach receiver

At this week’s European Forum for Research and Innovation on Information and Communication Technology (ICT 2010) in Brussels, Belgium (26–29 September), VI Systems GmbH of Berlin, Germany (a fabless spin-off of the Technical University of Berlin and the A. F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St Petersburg, Russia) is presenting its new R40-850TB optical receiver package.

The device integrates the firm's multimode-fiber-compatible photo-detector chip, a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) integrated circuit and matching components within a high-frequency ceramic micro-assembly, enabling extremely low power consumption for data rates of up to 45Gb/s.

Integration is designed to dramatically improve the quality of signal transmission. Using the firm's V40-850M multimode-fiber-coupled vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) module as the transmitting device, the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio measured at the receiver at –3dBm optical power using non-return-to-zero pseudo-random bit sequence (PRBS 27-1) encoding at 40Gb/s exceeded S/N = 6.5, demonstrating a major advance in low-cost, low-power consumption 40Gb/s optical transmission, the firm claims.

VI Systems says that the advantages of its optical subassemblies are in their ultra-low power consumption, with the driver and TIA ICs each consuming less than 130–150mW at 40Gb/s, improving the energy efficiency of data centers.

Targeted applications include short-reach (0.5m–10km) and very-short-reach systems as well chip-to-chip optical interconnects used in high-performance computing. Future serial standards for electrical interfaces operating at data rates higher than the present rates of up to 14Gb/s are currently being developed within the Infiniband EDR (26Gb/s per lane, 2011), Common Electrical Interface (CEI-25/28G), Fiber Channel FC32G and IEEE 40/100G Ethernet standards.

The work has been supported in part by the project ‘Vertical Integrated Systems for Information Transfer’ (VISIT), funded within the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union (EU). The members of the VISIT consortium are Intel (Ireland), IQE (UK), VI Systems (Germany), Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), The University of Cambridge (UK), University College Cork (Ireland), The Technical University of Berlin (Germany) and the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute (Russia).

The VISIT consortium is exhibiting at ICT 2010 in booth C07 of the SME village.

Search: VI Systems Optical receiver

Visit: www.v-i-systems.com

Visit: http://ec.europa.eu

For more: Latest issue of Semiconductor Today