21 March 2017

Inphi announces commercial availability and production ramp for ColorZ

Inphi Corp of Santa Clara, CA, USA (a provider of high-speed mixed-signal ICs for communications, computing and data-center markets) has announced the commercial availability and production ramp of ColorZ, which is claimed to be the first silicon photonics 100G PAM4 platform for 80km DWDM data-center interconnect (DCI) in QSFP28 form factor. Announced a year ago at the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC 2016) trade show in Anaheim, ColorZ (which supports 100G Ethernet) utilizes pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) signaling and delivers up to 4Tb/s of bandwidth over a single fiber, allowing multiple data centers located up to 80km from each other to be connected and act like a single data center.

ACG Research forecasts that the global optical infrastructure market will grow from $13.3bn in 2015 to $17.9bn by 2020, with purchases of optical DCI equipment growing from $1.03bn in 2015 to $4.15bn in 2020. Driven by streaming video, social networking, clouding computing and mobile commerce, the demand for speed and bandwidth between data centers is motivating mega-cloud data-center operators to deploy high-density, low-latency and low-power DWDM links to connect multiple data centers within a distance of 80km of each other.

“The ability to provide high-bandwidth connectivity in a small, cost-effective form factor expands metro DCI options for the benefit of geo-distributed applications and workloads,” comments Timothy Doiron, principal analyst, Intelligent Networking practice at ACG. “In a recent study, we concluded that ColorZ lowered DCI total cost of ownership by up to 67% while also reducing rack space and power consumption,” he adds.
“The current gap in the inter-data-center interconnects is at the sub-80km segment, which is being supported by either lower-speed 10G or higher-power 100G metro solutions,” says Dr Loi Nguyen, founder, senior VP, optical interconnect at Inphi. “ColorZ is the lowest-power and most cost-effective solution for DCI up to 80km,” he adds.

In booth #3601 at the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC 2017) trade show in Los Angeles (21-23 March), a live interoperability demonstration of ColorZ QSFP28 will consist of driving 3.6Tb/s of bi-directional East-West traffic over 80km of fiber between two Arista 7500R platform and 100G line-card connected via AVDA Optical Networking’s direct detect Open Line System (OLS) with SmartAmp technology. The demonstration will showcase the simplicity and plug & play capabilities of ColorZ for edge data-center connectivity.

“With the growing demands of connecting hyperscale data centers, there is a critical need for reach-specific optical solutions that have the right density, power and cost,” comments Steve Penticost, VP, global business development, at ADVA Optical Networking. “Our joint demonstration with Inphi highlights how our ColorZ-optimized direct detect OLS with SmartAmp technology helps to move traffic between these data centers, while improving power and density.”

Tags: Inphi 100G optical modules

Visit: www.inphi.com