Coherent To Demonstrate 200G Per Lane For 800G and 1.6T Transceivers at OFC 2023

PITTSBURGH, March 7, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – Coherent Corp. (NYSE: COHR), a leader in optical communications components and subsystems, today announced that it will demonstrate an optical transceiver module operating at 200 Gbps per optical lane and co-packaged optical (CPO) multimode optical engine operating at 50 Gbps NRZ at OFC 2023 in San Diego, March 7-9, booth #3815. These pluggable and co-packaged modules embody the next generation of 800 Gbps and 1.6 Tbps optical modules for the data networking industry in single-mode and multimode applications, respectively.

“These demonstrations will showcase the state of the art in datacom transceiver technology as we approach the era of terabit transmission,” said Dr. Lee Xu, Executive Vice President, Datacom Transceivers. “Such advances are critical to sustain the accelerating growth of the cloud through power efficiencies and cost reductions at both the module and architecture level.”

200G per lane OSFP optical transceiver

This live demonstration will showcase an OSFP form factor with 200G PAM4 per lane optical and 100G PAM4 per lane electrical interfaces, with an optical reach of up to 2 km. This transceiver is for use in the next generation of 25T and 50T Ethernet switches. It represents a natural evolution from transceivers with 100G optical lanes and is more power-efficient and cost-effective than previous generations. This technology is expected to form the core of the second generation of 800G transceivers and the first generation of 1.6T transceivers. They represent a natural evolution from transceivers with 100G optical lanes and are more power-efficient and cost-effective. Initial applications are anticipated in hyperscale datacenters, with enterprise applications to follow.

Co-packaged 800G multimode optical engine

This live demonstration will showcase a module that features 16 channels of 50G NRZ transmitters and receivers in a 15 mm x 15 mm x 4 mm multimode CPO 800G VCSEL-based engine. The entire analog front end, including the driver, VCSEL, photodiode, and transimpedance amplifier, consumes less than 4 pJ/bit. Each VCSEL is paired with another unpowered device to enable 100% cold sparing for extremely high reliability. Such multimode CPO engines are intended for use in cost-, power-, and latency-sensitive applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning computer clusters. Prototypes of this multimode CPO engine, which are jointly developed with IBM under the sponsorship of ARPA-E, are available for immediate evaluation.