At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC 2014) in San Francisco (9–13 March), the fabless integrated silicon photonics system-on-a chip company Skorpios Technologies Inc of Albuquerque, NM, USA is demonstrating a 100G QSFP28 transceiver in which, utilizing Skorpios’ template assisted bonding (STAB) process, the lasers, modulators, detectors and optical multiplexer/de-multiplexer are monolithically integrated into a single die, providing cost, size and power benefits unachievable with any alternative technologies, it is claimed.
“With our unique integration approach, we can build solutions such as this product, which meet the increasing challenges of bandwidth growth within data centers,” says Alfredo Viglienzoni, senior VP sales, marketing & business development. “This is particularly attractive for those customers who have to operate within fixed infrastructure constraints to minimize capex,” he adds.
“The Skorpios QSFP28 underscores our ability to integrate higher-level module solutions based on our STAB process,” comments Glenn Li, VP engineering, Enterprise. “It operates without active cooling, and has a reach of up to 10km, making it ideal for the mega-scale architectures which are emerging to support cutting-edge services," he adds. “This product represents our first step towards multi-Tb/s interconnect bandwidth with small footprint, low power consumption, and low cost. Our high-speed WDM solutions enable bandwidth increase by better utilizing and without altering the existing cabling structure, thus offering a low- barrier, future-proof upgrade path.”
Also at OFC, Skorpios is demonstrating a new micro-ITLA (integrable tunable laser assembly) utilizing its STAB process. The laser was designed to meet the stringent demands of next-generation high-bandwidth coherent 100G transceivers, with linewidths of less than 100kHz, low optical noise, high power and high stability.
“Launching our micro-ITLA is an important inflection point for Skorpios,” says John Zyskind, VP engineering. “Not only have we productized one of the hardest types of laser to develop, but we have initiated production based on our STAB platform, where we integrate a small amount of heterogeneous material using a wafer-scale process within a commercial CMOS fab. This gives us a very attractive cost structure, as well as high reliability because the device is natively hermetic. The Skorpios micro-ITLA will be used as a springboard into more highly integrated devices with a wide range of applications,” he adds.
“Using Skorpios’ micro-ITLA, customers are able to deploy coherent modules and transceivers, which have a significantly lower cost and power consumption than are achievable with current technologies,” says Rob Stone, VP of marketing.