Mentions

The OIF announced that the official release of the 400ZR implementation agreement is now available for download.

Infinera announced new versions of the Groove chassis to support 5th generation coherent ICE6 optics and provide feature enhancements to better address applications outside of cloud and colo operators.

Acacia announced a new family of 400G coherent pluggable optics for 400ZR/Open ROADM applications based on the new 7nm Greylock DSP.

Lightwave gathered opinions from several people in the industry to look at the opportunity for 400G in the data center during 2020.

Gazettabyte authored a lengthy article about the sampling of the first 400G DSP for use in pluggable applications. It included an interview with Inphi, Neophotonics, and analysts including Andrew Schmitt.

Inphi announced it sampled the industry’s first 400ZR QSFP-DD module to major cloud operators and equipment manufacturers.

Inphi announced it sampled its new Canopus coherent DSP, the industry’s first merchant 7nm coherent DSP designed to support 400ZR and 400ZR+ applications. Andrew Schmitt commented in the press release, joined by others from Arista and Juniper.

Infinera introduced its roadmap concept for XR optics, the industry’s first point-to-multipoint coherent optical subcarrier aggregation technology. Andrew Schmitt provided editorial commentary in the release.

Inphi announced that it was first to production with a 100Gbps/400Gbps Single-Lambda PAM4, a complete 56GBaud solution with linear TIA and drivers.

Andrew Schmitt spoke at the Optical Internetworking Forum’s 3Q19 meeting in Montreal on July 30th, 2019. The OIF press release mentioned the two new projects kicked off at the meeting as well as highlighted Andrew’s presentation on 400ZR, which was attended by about 100 OIF members.

LightWave summarized the opinions of several people in the optics industry about the $2.6B proposed acquisition of Acacia by Cisco.

LightReading reported on Cisco’s proposed acquisition of Acacia and requested a quote from Cignal AI.

LightReading summarized the challenges faced by Neophotonics as a result of the ban on component shipments to Huawei. The article quoted Andrew Schmitt at length about the potential outcome of the ban and the prospect for M&A activity involving Neophotonics as a result.

OIF standardization initiatives catalyzed a transition from multiple proprietary tunable laser solutions to a nearly universally used standard

Before OFC, Acacia highlighted progress towards bringing the AC1200 optical module and Pico DSP to production with customer field trials of its components in Adva and Cisco equipment.

Cisco mentioned multi-haul, our concept of a coherent link that is capable of operating across a wide range of speeds and distance, in a blog detailing the results of a trial with Verizon of their new NCS1004 platform.

Ciena announced its latest generation of coherent technology with a dual strategy of pushing coherent speeds to 800Gbs as well as delivering low power pluggable 400ZR solutions.

Infinera announced the details and schedule for ICE6, its next-generation coherent engine featuring 800G operation. It is a 1.6T monolithic PIC co-packaged with a new internally developed 7nm DSP.

Lightwave summarized the acquisition of Finisar by II-VI and requested commentary from Cignal AI.

On November 5th, Andrew Schmitt and Scott Wilkinson traveled to New York for a day of 1:1 meetings with investors and a lunch presentation to a group of investors. Topics included the role compact modular systems would play in shaping operator spending, Chinese spending and technology trends and discussion of the ongoing industry consolidation.

Raymond James released a note summarizing the discussions – some observations are excerpted here: