Google's Firmina cable to link North and South America

Google announced plans to build a 12-fiber pair subsea cable linking North and South America via the Atlantic.

The Firmina cable system, which will be designed, manufactured and installed by SubCom, will run from the East coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil and Punta del Este, Uruguay. 

The Firmina system will use SubCom's 18kV power technology, which will enable Firmina to be the world's longest cable capable of maintaining operations with single-end feed power, in the event there is a far-end fault. 

Manufacture of the cable and equipment will take place at SubCom’s recently expanded manufacturing campus in Newington, NH, USA during 2021 and early 2022, with main lay installation operations scheduled for summer 2022. The system is expected to be ready for service by the end of 2023.

In a blog post announcing the cable, Bikash Koley, VP Global Networking, Google Cloud stated: “As people and businesses have come to depend on digital services for many aspects of their lives, Firmina will improve access to Google services for users in South America. With 12 fiber pairs, the cable will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America, giving users fast, low-latency access to Google products such as Search, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services.”

The cable is named after Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825 - 1917), a Brazilian abolitionist, considered Brazil’s first novelist, whose 1859 novel, Úrsula, depicted life for Afro-Brazilians under slavery.

Including Firmina, Google now has investments in 16 subsea cables, such as Dunant, Equiano and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like Echo, JGA, INDIGO, and Havfrue.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-the-firmina-subsea-cable

Read More

Avicena develops highly parallel optical interconnect for chips

Avicena, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, unveiled a highly parallel optical interconnect technology targeting up to 10 meters reach for chip-to-chip interconnects in distributed computing, processor-to-memory disaggregation, and other advanced computing applications. 

Avicena's LightBundle is based on arrays of novel GaN high-speed micro-emitters, leveraging the microLED display manufacturing ecosystem, and is fully compatible with high performance silicon ICs. The company has demonstrated an array of 200 CROME devices with a pitch of 30μm coupled to an array of PDs with a multi-core imaging fiber. Avicena says individual lanes show excellent performance characteristics up to a data rate of 10Gbps over the full temperature range of -40°C to 150°C. This extrapolates to an aggregate link bandwidth of 2Tbps for 200 lanes with a bandwidth density of 10Tbps/mm2.

“All of this is changing with the recent advances in optical emitter technology driven by advances in the display industry,” says Bardia Pezeshki, founder and CEO of Avicena. “We have developed very high-performance optical transmitters based on emitter technology from the display industry. These innovative devices would have been impractical just a few years ago. Our optimized devices and materials support 10Gbps links per lane over -40°C to +150°C temperature with excellent reliability. We refer to our new optical sources as Cavity-Reinforced Optical Micro-Emitters or CROMEs. We connect CROME arrays with CMOS compatible PDs using multi-core fiber bundles to create massively parallel interconnects with 1000s of parallel lanes over a reach of up to 10m. We call this new class of optical interconnect the Avicena LightBundleTM.”

The company says the parallel nature of its LightBundle technology is well-matched to parallel chiplet interfaces like AIB, HBI, and BoW, and can also be used to extend the reach of standard compute interconnects like PCIe, NVLink, and multi-channel G/DDR memory links with low power and low latency.

https://avicena.tech/

Read More

Corning showcases fiber innovations

Corning is showcasing its new fiber and cable innovations at this week's virtual OFC. Highlights:

• MiniXtend cable line. This 192-fiber micro cable with binderless FastAccess® technology will leverage Corning’s new SMF-28 Contour fiber with 190-micron outer diameter. The compact MiniXtend XD cable provides installers with greater flexibility in tighter spces without sacrificing fiber density or deployment speed – enabling 33% more fibers per duct compared to legacy MiniXtend HD cable and 70% faster cable access compared to traditional cable designs.
• RocketRibbon cable portfolio, including the world’s first armored cables with Corning’s FastAccess technology – offering ease of installation coupled with innovative ribbon protection. The innovation is offered in 288-fiber, 432-fiber, and 864-fiber variations. The compact designs enable up to twice as much fiber per duct and 60% faster cable access than existing solutions, while maintaining the benefits of a backward-compatible and proven industry-standard ribbon design.
• 
  SMF-28 ULL fiber, Corning’s newest long-haul terrestrial fiber, features advanced bend capability and designed for the most challenging long-haul and high-data-rate networks. Compared to standard single-mode fibers, it enables up to twice the capacity and reach at data rates of 800G and greater, at a lower cost per bit.
• The latest innovations in Corning’s data center portfolio, including Corning CleanAdvantage Technology and MTP PRO Connecter with Push-Pull boot, which provide high-performance data centers with faster, cost-effective deployments and a streamlined path to revenue growth.
• Evolv Hardened Connectivity Solutions with Pushlok Technology, designed to simplify fiber deployment for all types of communications networks, enabling 5G-ready connectivity in the most congested of environments.
• Everon Network Solutions, the complete enterprise-grade network solution built on optical technology, delivering reduced costs at installation and over the lifetime of a building. The Everon portfolio includes solutions for the fiber backbone, cellular connectivity, and 5G-ready capabilities all the way to the edge of the network, giving building operators the flexibility and scale to design for the future.
• Corning’s newest solutions for original equipment manufacturers, showcasing expertise in bringing high-density optical connectivity directly to the chip.

“Reliable, high-speed connectivity has never been more vital – from access networks, to cloud data centers, to smart buildings, to the promise of 5G,” said Dr. Bernhard Deutsch, vice president and general manager, Corning Optical Fiber and Cable. “Optical fiber, cable, and connectivity are at the center of all these technologies. As bandwidth demands accelerate, Corning remains at the forefront of innovation for every segment of the network.”

Corning’s experts will offer insights on industry trends during workshops throughout the conference. Topics including co-packaged optics; the next 10 years of optical networks; power efficiency in submarine fiber systems; and the past, present, and future of fiber innovation.  

Read More

AWS launches Proton app delivery service for containers

Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of AWS Proton, an application delivery service that makes it easier for customers to provision, deploy, and monitor microservices for container and serverless applications. 

With AWS Proton, a customer’s infrastructure team creates standard application stacks defining the architecture, infrastructure resources, CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) pipeline, and observability tools—and then makes these stacks available to their developers. Developers can use AWS Proton’s self-service interface to select an application stack for use with their code. AWS Proton automatically provisions the resources for the selected application stack, deploys the code, and sets up monitoring so developers can begin building serverless and container applications without having to learn, configure, or maintain the underlying resources. There are no upfront commitments or fees to use AWS Proton, and customers pay only for the AWS services used to create, scale, and run their applications. 

“Customers have told us that while they love the operational benefits that container and serverless applications provide, it is incredibly challenging to scale these architectures across their organizations because of the many manual tasks involved in deploying apps that use microservices,” said Deepak Singh, VP, Compute Services, AWS. “AWS Proton brings together customers’ infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipeline, and observability into a single interface, so developers can quickly go from code in a repo to a production application. Developers rely on AWS Proton’s self-service capabilities to deploy code quickly and securely without having to become experts on each of the underlying services involved, while the central infrastructure team can be assured that the apps deployed by their developers using AWS Proton meet the standards they have set for their business.”

AWS Proton is now available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) with additional region availability coming soon.

https://aws.amazon.com/proton

Read More

Xilinx debuts Versal AI Edge series processors

Xilinx introduced the Versal AI Edge series processors, boasting 4X the AI performance-per-watt versus GPUs and 10X greater compute density versus previous-generation adaptive SoCs.

Xilinx is positioning the new Versal AI Edge adaptive compute acceleration platforms (ACAPs) for a range of applications including: automated driving with the highest levels of functional safety, collaborative robotics, predictive factory and healthcare systems, and multi-mission payloads for the aerospace and defense markets. The portfolio features AI Engine-ML to deliver 4X machine learning compute compared to the previous AI Engine architecture and integrates new accelerator RAM with an enhanced memory hierarchy for evolving AI algorithms. These architectural innovations deliver up to 4X AI performance-per-watt versus GPUs and lower latency resulting in far more capable devices at the edge.

"Edge computing applications require an architecture that can evolve to address new requirements and scenarios with a blend of flexible compute processing within tight thermal and latency constraints,” said Sumit Shah, senior director, Product Management and Marketing at Xilinx. “The Versal AI Edge series delivers these key attributes for a wide range of applications requiring greater intelligence, making it a critical addition to the Versal portfolio with devices that scale from intelligent edge sensors to CPU accelerators.”

The Versal AI Edge series takes the production-proven 7nm Versal architecture and miniaturizes it for AI compute at low latency, all with power efficiency as low as six watts and safety and security measures required in edge applications. As a heterogeneous platform with diverse processors, the Versal AI Edge series matches the engine to the algorithm, with Scalar Engines for embedded compute, Adaptable Engines for sensor fusion and hardware adaptability, and Intelligent Engines for AI inference that scales up to 479 (INT4) TOPS2—unmatched by ASSPs and GPUs targeting edge applications—and for advanced signal processing workloads for vision, radar, LiDAR, and software defined radio.

Sampling is available to early access customers, with shipments expected during the first half of 2022.

https://www.xilinx.com/versal-ai-edge

Read More

Samsung announces 8nm RF chip architecture for 5G

Samsung Electronics introduced its newest radio frequency (RF) technology based on 8-nanometer (nm) process.

Samsung’s 8nm RF process technology is the latest addition to an already broad portfolio of RF-related solutions, including 28nm- and 14nm-based RF. The company notes shiptment of more than 500 million mobile RF chips for premium smartphones since 2017.

Samsung has developed a unique architecture exclusive to 8nm RF named RFextremeFET (RFeFET) that can significantly improve RF characteristics while using less power. In comparison to 14nm RF, Samsung’s RFeFET supplements the digital PPA scaling and restores the analog/RF scaling at the same time, thereby enabling high-performance 5G platforms. Compared to 14nm RF, Samsung’s 8nm RF process technology provides up to a 35-percent increase in power efficiency with a 35-percent decrease in the RF chip area as a result of the RFeFET architectural innovation.

“Through excellence in innovation and process manufacturing, we’ve reinforced our next-generation wireless communication offerings,” said Hyung Jin Lee, Master of Foundry Technology Development Team at Samsung Electronics. “As 5G mmWave expands, Samsung’s 8nm RF will be a great solution for customers looking for long battery life and excellent signal quality on compact mobile devices.”

Read More

Marcatel deploys 600G Long-haul in Mexico with Ciena

Marcatel, a telecommunications carrier based in Mexico, is deploying Ciena’s coherent optical technology to support a new network connecting Querétaro, Mexico, to McAllen, Texas. The network, which serves content delivery providers and wholesale carriers, allows Marcatel to offer low-latency, high-capacity data center interconnect (DCI) services at speeds up to 600Gbps across long distances.

“Marcatel has long been a pioneer in the networking industry in Mexico, and we’re again raising the bar with the first network in the country to carry 600G waves for long-haul distances,” said Gustavo M. de la Garza Flores, CEO of Grupo Marcatel.

Marcatel installed Ciena’s flexible 6500 photonic line system and Waveserver 5 powered by WaveLogic 5 Extreme for multi-terabit capacity across a long-haul coherent optical network of more than 1000km, providing high fiber capacity without regeneration. With this deployment, Marcatel can instantly react to unpredictable traffic demands by scaling connectivity and capacity to support a wide array of applications and services—all while taking up less space in equipment rooms with a compact footprint.

http://www.ciena.com

Read More

Amazon activates its 3rd Availability Zone in the Beijing with Sinnet

Amazon Web Services is adding a third Availability Zone (AZ) to the China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet.

Fow AWS, an AZ encompasses one or more discrete data centers in separate facilities, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. With this launch, both AWS Regions in China offer three AZs.

Read More

MACOM and MaxLinear pair PAM4 DSPs and 100G/lane TIAs

MACOM and MaxLinear announced a collaboration to assure interoperability of MaxLinear’s PAM4 DSPs and MACOM’s 100G/lane transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) for 100G/lambda applications. 

The collaboration includes pairing the MxL93516, MaxLinear’s second-generation 100G Snowmass DSP, with MACOM’s low power MATA-05817 100G TIA to achieve exceptional sensitivity and a low BER floor. This configuration is ideal for 100G-DR1/FR1/LR1 QSFP28 applications for Data Center and front haul applications.

“Our customers are requesting proven high-performance solutions,” said Marek Tlalka, Senior Director, High-Performance Analog, at MACOM. “This collaboration offers the industry a compelling performance proof point and a potential path to shorter design cycle times for 100G, 400G and 800G module manufacturers.”

“The market for 100G/lambda transceivers continues to grow and performance and time to market are critical for our customers,” said Drew Guckenberger, Vice President of MaxLinear’s High-Speed Interconnect Group. “The pairing of our second generation power optimized Snowmass 100G DSP with integrated driver with MACOM’s high-performance TIAs is an ideal solution for customers, providing tight integration, proven high-performance and low-power capabilities.”

The companies plan to continue collaborating on 400Gbps and 800Gbps applications utilizing the recently announced MaxLinear 5nm Keystone DSPs and MACOM’s extensive portfolio of four channel 400Gbps TIAs.

https://www.macom.com/products/product-detail/MATA-05817

Read More

Go!Foton offers "Any Density” optical patch panel

 Go!Foton announced the general availability of NEMO (Network Enhanced Manageable Optics), its lightweight patch panel. Powered by PEACOC, the company’s flagship fiber management platform which introduced spreadable adapters to fiber connectivity management, NEMO targets traditional bulkhead-style fiber panels and enables substantially higher port counts in any fixed space when compared with legacy installations.

“NEMO’s spreadable adapters allow superior access and secure fiber management for any number or type of connection. It is ideal for today’s high-capacity and data-rate intensive telecommunication and data communication networks,” said Go!Foton CTO Dr. David Z. Chen.

“Uniquely in the industry, NEMO allows untooled error-free access to all fiber connections for even the largest hands, and from both sides of the rack, while minimizing insertion loss,” Dr. Chen continued. “With its support for an extensive variety of connector types—including LC, SC, SN, CS, MDC, and MPO, and its ability to accommodate any cable size from 1.2mm-3.5mm, NEMO is the ideal connectivity solution for optical network operators confronting the challenge of growing densification.”

https://www.gofoton.com/hot-new-gfa-items/

Read More

Riverbed appoints Dan Smoot as President and CEO

Riverbed appointed Dan Smoot as President and CEO.

Smoot, who has more than 30 years of experience holding top leadership roles including at Salesforce, Cisco and VMware, joined Riverbed in June 2018. At Riverbed, he has held several executive leadership roles, including most recently COO and leading the company’s Worldwide Sales, Channels and Alliances, Sales Operations and Customer Experience teams.

Smoot was previously Executive Vice President of Global Partner Sales at Salesforce, managing the Worldwide Partner Sales organization. He was also Executive Vice President of Market Readiness at Salesforce, where he created a global organization to deliver critical go-to-market operations. Prior to Salesforce, Smoot worked at VMware as Senior Vice President of Global Customer Operations, overseeing advanced technology sales, global services, renewals, global channels and alliances, OEM/ISV sales and go-to-mark strategy. Before VMware, he spent more than 12 years in a variety of senior leadership roles at Cisco.

“Dan has been a stand-out leader at Riverbed and brings tremendous industry experience having held senior leadership roles at some of world’s leading technology companies,” said Robert ‘Tre’ Sayle, Riverbed Board Member and Thoma Bravo Partner (Riverbed is a portfolio company of Thoma Bravo). “Dan has an unwavering commitment to Riverbed’s customers and partners, an exceptional track record driving operational excellence and business results, and is a strong leader of people and culture. Dan is the right leader to take Riverbed to the next level and drive profitable growth for our business, and continued innovation to support customers and partners. I also want to thank our previous CEO, Rich McBee, who helped lead Riverbed during a critical time, including setting a strong foundation for the future and navigating the Company through a global pandemic.”

http://www.riverbed.com

Read More