Kaiam Corp of Newark, CA, USA - a private company founded in 2009 commercializing hybrid photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology for pluggable optical transceivers in data-centers - has launched the new platform LightScale2.
The planar approach combines multiple transmit and receive blocks in a very dense architecture that is said to be simple to assemble and delivers higher performance than standard transmitter/receiver optical sub-assemblies (TOSA/ROSA) approaches. Kaiam is currently sampling CWDM4 100G QSFP28 transceivers based on this architecture. The firm also expects to deliver 200G, 400G and higher density on-board optics with this platform in the future, extending its capabilities in hybrid integration technology for single-mode WDM transceivers.
Kaiam has been shipping 40G and 100G transceivers for hyperscale datacentres in volume since 2014 using a MEMS-aligned hybrid optical integration approach. The firm's LightScale1 platform uses this proprietary MEMS technique for optical engines in a standard TOSA/ROSA architecture. LightScale2 flattens the internal architecture of the transceiver to further improve density, RF signal integrity, thermal management, power consumption, and manufacturing simplicity.
"Today most single-mode transceivers use legacy telecom-type approaches that result in bulky packaging of components," says CEO Bardia Pezeshki. "This not only increases cost and manufacturing complexity, but degrades performance, as electrical and optical signals and heat must traverse multiple interfaces," he adds. "Kaiam's MEMS-based packaging is intrinsically dense, combining best-of-breed components such as indium phosphide (InP) lasers, silicon photonics, and silica-waveguide integrated optics. By liberating our technology from outdated telecom architectures, we can manufacture very dense and high-performance multi-wavelength transceivers and modules."
Kaiam is exhibiting on stand #389 at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC 2016) in Düsseldorf, Germany (19-21 September).
