News: Optoelectronics
10 January 2020
Inphi surpasses milestone of 100,000 COLORZ units shipped
Inphi Corp of Santa Clara, CA, USA (a provider of high-speed mixed-signal ICs for communications, computing and data-center markets) has shipped more than 100,000 units of its COLORZ transceiver, which is claimed to be the first, lowest-power and most cost-effective 100G silicon photonics PAM4 (4-level pulse amplitude modulation) platform solution for 80km DWDM connectivity in a QSFP28 form factor.
“This significant accomplishment underscores Inphi’s commitment to delivering technological innovations that dramatically increase the speed of data movement between data centers and help reduce total cost of ownership for cloud network operators,” comments CEO Dr Ford Tamer.
Demand for bandwidth, driven by streaming video, social networking, cloud computing and mobile e-commerce, is motivating network operators to deploy cloud applications closer to the end users, says Inphi. Low latency and scalability requirements combined with geographical limitations favor the virtualization of connected regional data centers. This trend is resulting in a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55% in DWDM bandwidth for sub-80km links, and early COLORZ adopters have made an architectural shift to IP over DWDM for data-center interconnects (DCIs), says the firm.
By integrating its PAM4 CMOS with its silicon photonics technology, Inphi says it took a unique approach to create a platform that achieves a 60% saving in cost and a 75% saving in power. Accomplishing the COLORZ ramp to 100,000 units within just three years also validates the network inflection point in the adoption of switch pluggable DWDM optics, the firm adds.
Initially developed for the requirements of Microsoft, the COLORZ platform has now been deployed by more than 40 network operators, ranging from wireless carriers to military and educational networks. The operational simplicity combined with the economic value continues to drive the adoption of COLORZ in the market place, Inpi says.
Yousef Khalidi, corporate VP, Azure Networking, Microsoft Corp. said, “Inphi shares our vision for DCI connectivity and we applaud their achievement of a significant milestone. Inphi’s COLORZ platform has been an important contributor to Microsoft’s high bandwidth metro design, to help enable greater cloud performance in a highly scalable solution.”
Inphi announces commercial availability and production ramp for ColorZ
