3 April 2014

Skorpios joins 100G CLR4 Alliance

Fabless integrated silicon photonics system-on-a-chip company Skorpios Technologies Inc of Albuquerque, NM, USA says that it has joined an alliance of companies supporting the 100G CLR4 CWDM (coarse wavelength-division multiplexing) specifications for data-center applications.

Announced at the Interop Las Vegas event on 1 April by Intel Corp and Arista Networks, the 100G CLR4 Alliance was organized by a group of industry leaders, major data center providers, networking companies and optical vendors who are in support of a transceiver based on 100G CWDM LR4 (long-reach four-wavelength) in the 1310nm window and 20nm spacing. Alliance partners believe that this approach will enable the rapid development and adoption of this market segment. Conversely, the lack of low-cost, 100G transceivers may become an impediment to the adoption of advanced CPUs (central processing units), FLASH, SSDs (solid-state drives) and switching silicon to build the next-generation systems for cloud, HPC (high-performance computing) and enterprise data centers. The alliance may evolve into an MSA (multi-source agreement) over time, says Skorpios.

At the Optical Fiber Communications conference (OFC 2014) in San Francisco (9-13 March), Skorpios announced and demonstrated products based on its proprietary Skorpios Template Assisted Bonding (STAB) process. In particular, it showcased its 100G 10km, CLR4 transceiver in a QSFP 28 package, together with its silicon photonics-based micro-ITLA (integrable tunable laser assembly). Skorpios claims that, with these products, it is delivering on the promise of silicon photonics with the highest-density form factor, lowest-power dissipation and lowest-cost products available on the market.

“Joining this alliance of industry leaders enables quicker adoption of Skorpios’ leading 100G QSFP28 product line,” says Alfredo Viglienzoni, senior VP of sales, marketing & business development. “Our novel technology platform allows us to deliver a single product that covers applications from a few hundreds of meters to 10 kilometers,” he adds. “At this point, the technology innovation, which has been the foundation of this company, evolves into product innovation as Skorpios ramps-up production.”

See related items:

Skorpios demos 100G QSFP28 transceiver; launches micro-ITLA tunable laser

Tags: silicon photonics QSFP28

Visit: www.skorpiosinc.com