Kaiam, a leading manufacturer of advanced data center optical transceivers, has initiated a strategic transceiver reserve program to protect U.S. and European data centers from the effects of the incipient US-China trade war.
The company said the need for a reserve supply of optical transceivers arises because of the broad tariffs recently enacted by the Trump administration, which could impede the importation of Chinese-made optical transceivers into the United States. Kaiam notes that U.S. cloud data centers are largely dependent on this supply of Chinese-made transceivers, making them vulnerable to collateral damage from the increasingly turbulent US-Chinese relationship.
Kaiam is a vertically-integrated manufacturer based in Newark, California with large-scale manufacturing in Livingston, Scotland.
“In today’s global economy, it’s easy to assume goods will flow seamlessly across borders indefinitely. We sometimes forget that the optical components that power Cloud companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others are virtually all made in China and are thus susceptible to trade tensions. As patriots, we believe a transceiver reserve is necessary for our domestic security,” said Jeremy Dietz, VP of Global Sales and Marketing at Kaiam. “Our advanced technology and manufacturing process allows us to easily build a buffer to protect our nation in case of an embargo or even a natural disaster. We are currently exploring secure underground locations in states such as Utah and Nevada.”
“Our Constitution implicitly guarantees the fundamental right to engage in online activities ranging from the sublime to the abject on a 24/7 basis,” said CTO Rob Kalman of Kaiam. “We view it as our patriotic duty to protect these rights, for it is more true than ever that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance!”
“All humor aside, we are seeing the benefits of our $80m investment in the automated UK line, and have the capacity to serve a large fraction of the high-performance optical transceiver market. The MEMS-based micro-packaging technology, together with our recent massive investments in automation and infrastructure, provides our Western customers with a secure source, free of potential trade issues,” said Bardia Pezeshki, President and CEO of Kaiam. “As we announced in a recent press release, we aim to serve the Asian market, with a similar local source, through our partnership with Broadex. This dual strategy eliminates any potential supply issues on both sides of the globe.”
Kaiam debuts 400G QSFP-DD
The new device, which is enabled by the company's LightScale2 architecture used in its XQX5000 series of 100GBASE-CWDM4 QSFP28 pluggables, is optimized for high-volume, low-cost manufacturing.
The company said its LightScale2 platform supports both 4-lane and 8-lane 200G and 400G transceiver variants, including 400G-LR8/FR8, 400G-FR4, 2x100G-LR4, 2x100G-CWDM4, 2x100G-4WDM-10, 200G-FR4, and 2x200G-FR4. These can be supported in either QSFP-DD or OSFP packages. The platform can further extend to future 800G solutions, and even beyond pluggables to Kaiam’s Co-Packaged Photonics Interconnect (CoPPhI).
“As capacity and density requirements increase in the data center, our MEMS-based PLC approach further outperforms traditional approaches,” commented Bardia Pezeshki, CEO. “At OFC 2018, we are demonstrating a transceiver that has 4x the bandwidth of the previous generation in roughly the same QSFP form factor, highlighting the bandwidth and density scalability of Kaiam’s technology.”
Kaiam reaches volume production of 100G CWDM4 transceivers
