- News
14 March 2018
Inphi starts production shipments of M200 LightSpeed-III 100/200G coherent DSP
© Semiconductor Today Magazine / Juno PublishiPicture: Disco’s DAL7440 KABRA laser saw.
Inphi Corp of Santa Clara, CA, USA (a provider of high-speed mixed-signal ICs for communications, computing and data-center markets) has started shipping the production version of its M200 LightSpeed-III coherent digital signal processor (DSP) with ultra-low power and high-performance supporting 100G and 200G data rates for long-haul, metro and data-center interconnect applications. Multiple tier-1 OEMs have committed to commercial deployments of the device in second-half 2018.
The M200 is the first offering in Inphi’s 16nm LightSpeed-III family of system-on-chip (SoC) devices leverages the firm’s DSP and FEC (forward error correction) technology, including internal analog expertise and SerDes IP. OEMs and module partners will be shipping M200-based solutions in high-density form factors like CFP2-DCO, CFP-DCO and highly integrated line cards based on discrete miniaturized optics or CFP2-ACOs.
“Power at the required performance, density and cost per bit are drivers for rapid expansion of metro networks,” comments John Lively, principal analyst for LightCounting Market Research. “The M200 family of ultra-low-power and high-performance coherent DSPs provides the power and performance flexibility required to enable lower-cost optical system architectures based on CFP2-DCO, CFP-DCO and dense line-card form factors,” he adds.
The M200 enables optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) performance of 17.5db for 200G 16QAM at the lowest power compared with other coherent DSPs, it is claimed. This performance is critical to enabling the large-scale transition from 100G to 200G in metro networks. The M200 leverages 16QAM modulation to deliver this performance, while enabling 30% higher spectral efficiency than competing 8QAM-based solutions, the firm adds. This enables 200G deployments on legacy and current networks that have been deployed with 50GHz grid spacing and maximizes the number of reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) nodes traversed without requiring electrical regeneration.
“Enabling our customers to ship M200-based solutions marks a key achievement paving the way for revenue ramp in 2018,” reckons Nariman Yousefi, senior VP, Coherent DSP, at Inphi. “In the second half on 2018 we will begin to see the first products in the market that demonstrate a dramatic value proposition in terms of density, power and cost reduction per bit.”
Inphi is showcasing the M200 in booth #4013 at the Optical Networking and Communication Conference & Exhibition (OFC 2018) in San Diego (13-15 March).
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