Apple expands advanced VCSEL manufacturing with II-VI

Apple has committed a further $410 million to II-VI to create additional capacity for manufacturing VCSEL devices and accelerate delivery of future components for iPhone.

II-VI manufactures vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) that help power Face ID, Memoji, Animoji, and Portrait mode selfies. Apple also works with II-VI to manufacture lasers used in the LiDAR Scanner — technology that helps deliver faster, more realistic augmented reality experiences and improves autofocus in low-light scenes in photos and videos.

The new award, which builds on an initial $390 million awarded from Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund in 2017, is expected to resul in 700 jobs in Sherman, Texas; Warren, New Jersey; Easton, Pennsylvania; and Champaign, Illinois.

“We established Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund to support American businesses creating next-generation technology and the jobs of tomorrow,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. “II-VI shares our commitment to push the boundaries of innovation and we’re proud to be extending our work together across the country.”

“The partnership between Apple and II-VI sets the stage for a new wave of breakthrough technologies that we believe will enable a wide range of applications that will benefit our world for decades to come,” said Dr. Vincent Mattera Jr., II-VI’s CEO. “We are incredibly grateful for Apple’s support which has allowed us to expand our manufacturing capacity and scale our operations across the US.”

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GlobalFoundries adapts silicon photonics for quantum computing

GlobalFoundries is now manufacturing the silicon photonic and electronic chips that form the foundation of PsiQuantum's Q1 quantum computer.

PsiQuantum, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, aims to be the first to deliver a commercially viable quantum computer with one million qubits.

PsiQuantum and GF have now demonstrated the ability to manufacture core quantum components, such as single-photon sources and single-photon detectors, with precision and in volume, using the standard manufacturing processes of GF’s semiconductor fab. The companies have also installed proprietary production and manufacturing equipment in two of GF’s 300mm fabs to produce thousands of Q1 silicon photonic chips at its facility in upstate New York, and state-of-the-art electronic control chips at its Fab 1 facility in Dresden, Germany.

PsiQuantum’s Q1 system represents breakthroughs in silicon photonics, which the company believes is the only way to scale to 1 million-plus qubits and beyond and to deliver an error-corrected, fault-tolerant, general-purpose quantum computer.

“In the past year, we have experienced a decade of technological change. Now, due to the digital transformation and the explosion of data we are faced with problems that require quantum computing to further accelerate the Renaissance of Compute,” said Amir Faintuch, senior vice president and general manager of Compute and Wired Infrastructure at GF. “PsiQuantum and GF’s partnership is a powerful combination of PsiQuantum’s photonic quantum computing expertise and GF’s silicon photonics manufacturing capability that will transform industries and technology applications across climate, energy, healthcare, materials science, and government.”

“This is a major achievement for both the quantum and semiconductor industries, demonstrating that it’s possible to build the critical components of a quantum computer on a silicon chip, using the standard manufacturing processes of a world-leading semiconductor fab,” said Pete Shadbolt, chief strategy officer and co-founder of PsiQuantum. “When we first envisioned PsiQuantum, we knew that scaling the system would be the existential question. Together with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, we have validated the manufacturing path for silicon photonics and are confident that by the middle of this decade, PsiQuantum will have completely stood up all the manufacturing lines and processes necessary to begin assembling a final machine.”

https://www.globalfoundries.com/press-release/psiquantum-and-globalfoundries-build-worlds-first-full-scale-quantum-computer

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Samsung adopts 2.5D packaging technology

Samsung Electronics Co. has begun implementing its next-generation 2.5D chip packaging technology Interposer-Cube4 (I-Cube4).

Samsung’s I-Cube is a heterogeneous integration technology that horizontally places one or more logic dies (CPU, GPU, etc.) and several High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) dies on top of a silicon interposer, making multiple dies operate as a single chip in one package.

Samsung’s new I-Cube4, which incorporates four HBMs and one logic die, was developed in March as the successor of I-Cube2. From high-performance computing (HPC) to AI, 5G, cloud and large data center applications, I-Cube4 is expected to bring another level of fast communication and power efficiency between logic and memory through heterogeneous integration.

“With the explosion of high-performance applications, it is essential to provide a total foundry solution with heterogeneous integration technology to improve the overall performance and power efficiency of chips,” said Moonsoo Kang, senior vice president of Foundry Market Strategy at Samsung Electronics. “With the mass-production experience amassed through I-Cube2 and the commercial breakthroughs of I-Cube4, Samsung will wholly support customers’ product implementations.”

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India gives go-ahead for 5G trials to 4 operators, 3 vendors

India's Department of Telecommunications (DoT)issued permits for 5G trials to Bharti Airtel, Reliance JioInfocomm, Vodafone Idea, and MTNL.  

Equipment vendors and technology providers supplying these operators for the trials are Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and C-DOT.  In addition, Reliance JioInfocomm Ltd. will also be conducting trials using its own indigenous technology. Huawei and ZTE are not included in the trials.

DoT has approved experimental spectrum in the mid-band (3.2 GHz to 3.67 GHz), millimeter wave band (24.25 GHz to 28.5 GHz) and in Sub-Gigahertz band (700 GHz).  TSPs will also be permitted to use their existing spectrum owned by them (800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2500 MHz) for conduct of 5G trials.

Some other notes from DoT:

• The duration of the trials, at present, is for a period of 6 months. This includes a time period of 2 months for procurement and setting up of the equipment.
• The test equipment is not to be connected to the operator's existing networks.
• Trials will be on non-commercial basis.  
• The data generated during the trials shall be stored in India.  
• The operators are also expected to facilitate the testing of the indigenously developed use cases and equipment as part of the trials. 
• One hundred applications/ use cases selected by DoT after conducting the recent Hackathon on 5G applications can also be facilitated in these trials. 

https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1715927

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DC BLOX buys land for data center campus in North Carolina

DC BLOX has acquired land in High Point, North Carolina with plans to construct the first highly secure, Tier III data center in the Carolina Core / Piedmont Triad region which includes High Point, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem.

DC BLOX designs, builds and operates highly secure and reliable Tier III-designed data centers in markets that have previously lacked such high-caliber facilities traditionally only offered in major markets. The carrier-neutral data center planned for the Carolina Core / Piedmont Triad region will be the first-of-its-kind in the market. When complete, the facility will be interconnected to DC BLOX’s fully redundant network infrastructure with a 99.999% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA). 

DC BLOX’s Southeastern regional network of data centers and connectivity partners includes access to the region’s Internet Exchanges (IX) in Atlanta and Nashville, and with plans to connect to the IX in Charlotte. Direct, private access to major public cloud providers and to all carriers across its data center footprint are also provided. The facility will offer colocation for hosting primary IT infrastructure as well as secondary disaster recovery sites and provide infrastructure for large-scale object storage solutions.

http://www.dcblox.com

DC BLOX secures $187M for data centers in southeastern U.S.

Monday, March 29, 2021  Data Centers, DC Blox  

DC BLOX, which operates Tier III-designed data centers located in Atlanta, Birmingham, Chattanooga, and Huntsville, secured $187 million in long-term financing led by Post Road Group and Bain Capital Credit. Proceeds will be used to refinance DC BLOX’s existing credit facilities, add liquidity to DC BLOX’s balance sheet, and provide additional capital to fund continued investments in existing and new data center capacity.“This financing would...

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DC BLOX begins data center construction in South Carolina

Sunday, April 04, 2021  Data Centers  

 DC BLOX initiated construction of its Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina data center. The data center, designed to Uptime Institute’s Tier III standards, will be the first-of-its-kind multi-tenant data center in South Carolina. The facility will be capable of protecting Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), providing enterprises and government entities throughout South Carolina access to a highly efficient, secure and interconnected...

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Juniper intros Security Director Cloud for managing SASE

Juniper Networks introduced a cloud-based portal that distributes connectivity and security services to sites, users and applications, as well as manages customers’ SASE transformations.

Juniper said its new Security Director Cloud bridges organizations’ current security deployments with their future SASE rollouts by providing security that is managed anywhere and everywhere, on-premises and in the cloud, from the cloud. Benefits include

• Experience-led management to facilitate network transformation. It features zero-touch provisioning and intuitive configuration wizards for secure connectivity, content security and advanced threat prevention for both on-premises and cloud-based security policy. In addition, a multi-directional sync between cloud-hosted and on-premises management and individual firewalls provides a cohesive management experience that supports a seamless and secure shift to a SASE architecture.
• Unified policies across physical, virtual and cloud-based security. Customers can create security policies — including user- and application-based access, IPS, anti-malware and web security policies — that follow users, devices or applications as they move to new locations, and automatically apply them. This unified policy construct across traditional and cloud-delivered security vehicles minimizes operational overhead otherwise required to recreate policies from one platform to another and decreases attack vectors inadvertently created by human error.
• Validated security effectiveness. Juniper provides cyberattack protection that has been validated by objective, third-party testing to be more than 99% effective against network and application exploits, new and commodity malware, IoT botnets and other attack techniques targeted at the edge and in the data center. This includes achieving the highest security efficacy rating at 99.5% from CyberRatings.org compared to leading security vendors for Enterprise Firewall, and 100% effectiveness with zero false positives in ICSA Labs’ Advanced Threat Defense test in Q4 of 2020. Security Director Cloud delivers policies empowered with these proven threat prevention technologies, ensuring quick access to applications and consistent security enforcement.
• Visibility into threat behaviors across the entire network with Security Director Insights. Security Director Cloud features correlated visibility into attacks across the network by bringing together threat detection information – including detections from other vendors’ products – into an attack timeline, and it enables one-touch mitigation to quickly address gaps in defense.

“Juniper is leading the move into the SASE market with a great management experience, putting our customers and their teams first,” said Samantha Madrid, VP of Security Business & Strategy at Juniper Networks. “With the introduction of Security Director Cloud, we’re able to meet customers where they are as they transition to a SASE architecture by delivering networking and security services from the cloud to sites, users and applications around the world. Security Director Cloud is like ‘iCloud’ for security operators, providing the ‘and’ strategy that enables our enterprise, cloud and service provider customers to transform their networks seamlessly and securely.”

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XKL announces 400G transponder systems

XKL announced a 400G transponder system.

With an additional XKL DMD (Mux/Demux), XKL's 400G has demonstrated a capacity of up to 4.8 Terabit (Tb) within a single 1U for the DQT400, another 1U for the DMD, or up to 19.2 Tb of available capacity when stacking four 400G systems through the additional DMD device. 

XKL is expecting to initially release a four (4) port configuration in September 2021, with the 12 port configuration expected shortly after.  

https://www.xkl.com/coming-soon

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ADTRAN posts Q1 revenue of $127.5 million

ADTRAN reported Q1 2021 revenue of $127.5 million compared to $114.5 million for the same period a year ago. Net income for the first quarter of 2021 was $0.9 million and earnings per share, assuming dilution, was $0.02 per share. Non-GAAP net income was $6.3 million and non-GAAP earnings per share, assuming dilution, was $0.13 per share. 

ADTRAN Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Tom Stanton stated, “Our business continues to be driven by strong demand for our fiber access platforms, in-home service delivery platforms and software platforms with regional service providers across the U.S. and Europe. These service providers increasingly turn to ADTRAN for end-to-end solutions that simplify the deployment of fiber-based broadband services while providing an enhanced subscriber experience. The increased demand for ADTRAN’s solutions was highlighted by record product order bookings in the quarter.”

ADTRAN also announced that its Board of Directors declared a cash dividend for the first quarter of 2021. The quarterly cash dividend of $0.09 per common share is to be paid to the company’s stockholders of record as of the close of business on May 20, 2021. 

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Canada's CDPQ acquires 30% stake in American Tower Europe

Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) will acquire a 30% stake in ATC Europe as part of a new long-term strategic partnership through a transaction valued at over €1.6 billion.

This implies an enterprise value of more than €8.8 billion for ATC Europe. 

Pursuant to the partnership agreement, American Tower will retain managerial and operational control, as well as day-to-day oversight of ATC Europe, while CDPQ will obtain seats on ATC Europe’s Board of Directors, along with certain governance rights.

Tom Bartlett, American Tower’s President and Chief Executive Officer, stated, “We are pleased to partner with CDPQ in Europe, where we expect to create tremendous value. CDPQ’s extensive infrastructure experience, deep knowledge of the region and long-term investment philosophy are in close alignment with American Tower’s European strategy, operational excellence and long track record of historical success. This transaction not only contributes to the funding of our pending Telxius acquisition, which will transform our scale and leadership position in highly attractive markets like Germany and Spain, but also creates a solid, adaptable framework through which future expansion opportunities can be evaluated and financed.”

Emmanuel Jaclot, CDPQ’s Executive Vice-President and Head of Infrastructure, said, “Through this new long-term strategic partnership with American Tower, CDPQ is thrilled to play an active role in establishing one of Europe’s largest independent communications infrastructure providers. This dedicated growth platform with a global leader enables us to increase our exposure in key European markets — including Germany, France and Spain — while contributing to the development of critical carrier-neutral telecom networks, at a time where telecommunications needs are more important than ever.”

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Ooredoo Kuwait picks Nokia for 5G Fixed Wireless Access

 Ooredoo Kuwait has selected Nokia to supply 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) customer premise equipment.  Ooredoo is using FWA to extend the reach of its fiber network to premises not easily connected with direct fiber lines. This will support the company to significantly increase its fixed broadband customer base across the country.

Ooredoo is now offering the Nokia FastMile 5G Gateway as a premium internet device for residential and business customers.

Nokia’s self-installable 5G FWA gateway incorporates Wi-Fi 6 with self-optimizing mesh technology.

Essa Haider, Director of Network Planning and Design, Ooredoo Kuwait, said: “Fixed broadband is essential for Kuwait’s economic growth and diversification. 5G Fixed Wireless Access is a key component of our strategy and we’re delighted to be partnering with Nokia to provide better coverage, reach and speed.”

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Cradlepoint expands 5G enterprise portfolio

Cradlepoint, now a division of Ericsson, introduced its second-generation 5G product portfolio featuring low-band to millimeter-wave solutions. external adapters and integrated 5G routers. Some highlights:

• R1900 Ruggedized 5G Mobile Router: a built-for-5G mobile router optimized for in-vehicle networks.
• E3000 5G Enterprise SD-WAN Router:  5G-optimized with a choice of high-speed fiber and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet WAN ports. It has an expansion slot for a second, field-upgradable modem and supports PoE and Captive Modem technology to connect Cradlepoint Wideband 5G Adapters.
• MC400-5G Modular Modem: The new MC400-5G Modular Model allows Cradlepoint customers to field-upgrade or add a second 5G modem to any Cradlepoint 5G-ready or optimized router. Supported models are the AER2200, IBR1700, E300, E3000, and R1900.
• W2000/W1850 5G Wideband Adapter (Indoor Unit): The W2000/W1850 indoor units are for low-band and mid-band 5G deployments where a 5G signal is acquirable indoors. Whereas the W2000 is ideal for immediate proof-of-concept and early implementations, the W1850 is the production-optimized version designed for widespread deployments.
• 
  W2005 5G Wideband Adapter (Outdoor Unit): The W2005 outdoor unit gives customers more flexibility in deploying 5G capacity-layer connectivity for buildings and fixed sites.
• W4005 5G Wideband Adapter for mmWave (Outdoor Unit): While mmWave 5G promises fiber-fast connections within the urban core, it also demands an outdoor line-of-sight deployment to achieve high-capacity performance. The W4005 is designed explicitly for this mission with multi-gigabit performance and liquid cooling, and it utilizes the latest Qualcomm high-power array antenna with beamforming, steering, and tracking technology.

https://cradlepoint.com/press-release/cradlepoint-unveils-second-generation-5g-product-portfolio-at-its-virtual-global-partner-summit-event/

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