Pulse Amplitude Modulation encodes information in the amplitude of a series of signal pulses.
In this video, Dr. Manish Mehta, EVP of Product Line Management at Source Photonics, introduces the fundamentals of PAM4 encoding, which is expected to play a major role in enabling lower cost, 100Gbps data center connections.
Source Photonics conducted a live demonstration of PAM4 2x50Gbps QSFP28 transceivers at #OFC2016. These will add to the company's portfolio of small form factor 100G optical transceivers.
The PAM4 demonstration comes on the heels of Source Photonics’ industry leading release of the 100G QSFP28 LR4 platform of products. Source Photonics announced first in industry sampling of the LR4 and LR4 Lite in March 2014 and mass production in March 2015. In January 2016, Source Photonics announced the shipment of its 10,000th QSFP28 module to customers.
The 2x50G-PAM4 QSFP28 will operate at a worst case power consumption of 3.5W at 70C case temperature and support KR4 FEC in the host IC. The company is also in development to support a KP4 FEC implementation similar to the FR8 requirements for 8-channel 400G standards.
“Cloud scale and Web 2.0 datacenters are demanding increased volume and lower cost 100G small form factor products and reducing component count is a critical long term solution”, says Sheng Zhang, Chief Scientist at Source Photonics. “We are demonstrating a major step towards the productization of PAM4 technology that will be instrumental in the cost reduction of 100G QSFP28 products and the release of initial 400G products.”
