Thursday, April 7, 2022

OIF Multivendor 400ZR Interoperability video

 

Karl Gass provides an overview of the OIF's 400ZR multivendor interoperability demonstration at OFC22 in San Diego, California.

Two set-ups are tested:

  • 400GE to Transport DWDM link - from an EXFO traffic generator/analyze via NeoPhotonics OSFP traversing a Cisco Open Line System to a Ciena Open Line system to a Cisco CFP-DCO in a Viavi traffic generator/analyzer
  • Round robin path consisting of 14 QSFP-DD modules, including modules from Cisco, Juniper, Ciena, Marvell, NeoPhotonics, and Fujitsu

MaxLinear debuts Quad-Port 2.5GBase-T PHY and 1GBase-T Switches

MaxLinear launched two 1000BASE-T Ethernet Switches (GSW125, GSW145) and a quad-port 2.5GBASE-T PHY (GPY245), expanding its Ethernet product portfolio to better serve harsh temperature environments.

The GPY245 quad-port 2.5GBASE-T industrial PHY supports

  • Low power consumption below 3.5W in 2.5GBASE-T mode
  • An effective rBOM
  • Industrial grade features like MACSec, PTP and SyncE
  • Either 4 x 2.5G SGMII or a 10G USXGMII-M MAC interface
  • Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) to reduce power consumption during low traffic periods
  • The low pin count and small size package (236 pin BGA 12mmx12mm) make this product ideal for 4-layer PCBs.

The GSW125, GSW145 industrial 1000BASE-T switches support

  • Two or four twisted-pair interfaces (PHYs)
  • Two MAC interfaces which can be 2.5G SGMII and RGMII
  • QoS to prioritize switch traffic for different classes of applications, such as VoIP, video, audio, and data based on port ID
  • Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) to reduce power consumption during low traffic periods
  • They are available in a small size 105 pin 8mmx8mm MRQFN package.

"MaxLinear has a 40-year history of being a leading supplier in industrial interface devices, having shipped over 1B serial transceivers over the past five years," said James Lougheed, Vice President of Marketing, High Performance Analog. "As the requirements for industrial-grade Ethernet products continue to grow, we continue to invest to remain in a strong position to support these fast-growing markets."

"Verifone, a global FinTech leader and payment solution provider to the world's largest retail brands, recently adopted the MaxLinear GSW145 Quad-port 1G Ethernet switch for its Engage family of payment terminals that provide secure, reliable and flexible payment experiences to merchants around the world," said Henry Wang, Global Commodity Director at Verifone. "This builds on the established relationship we have with MaxLinear as our supplier for our Interface product needs."

https://www.maxlinear.com

Lightbits adds key exec to its team

Lightbits Labs, a start-up based in San Jose, California focused on NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) software-defined storage, has appointed Charla Bunton-Johnson as its new Vice President of Global Alliances and Channel. 

Before joining Lightbits, Bunton-Johnson worked at Telos, NVIDIA, Symantec, and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. In addition, Charla is a member of Chief, a private network specifically designed for senior women leaders to strengthen their leadership journey, cross-pollinate ideas across industries, and affect change from the top-down.

“This key appointment combined with our technical expertise in private, public, and edge cloud storage provide the backbone that partners can leverage to serve the market more effectively. Charla has a wealth of experience in the channel and building programs for partners to deliver value through technology-driven leadership. We have exciting opportunities ahead of us, and we are looking forward to Charla’s influence in increasing the footprint of Lightbits as the partner of choice for a high-performance cloud data platform,” said Kam Eshghi, Chief Strategy Officer at Lightbits.

A key focus for Bunton-Johnson will be the collaboration with Intel. Lightbits software-defined storage when combined with Intel high-performance hardware—Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Optane Persistent memory (PMem), and Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters—delivers the ultimate in performance, resilience, and scalability while lowering cost.

https://www.lightbitslabs.com

Intel and Lightbits Labs targets NVMe over Fabrics TCP

 Intel announced a partnership with Lightbits Labs focused on disaggregated storage solutions. The partnership includes technical co-engineering, go-to-market collaboration and an Intel Capital investment in Lightbits Labs. Lightbits, which is based in Israel, delivers high-performance shared storage across servers while providing high availability and read-and-write management designed to maximize the value of flash-based storage. Lightbits...

Lightbits delivers software-defined NVMe/TCP storage for VMware

Lightbits Labs, a start-up that offers NVMe-based, scalable and software-defined elastic block storage, completed a rigorous certification of LightOS with VMware vSphere 7 Update 3 and will be listed on the VMware Compatibility Guide. Lightbits' LightOS is a scalable, efficient NVMe/TCP storage solution with intelligent flash management. The company claims its solution improves flash endurance by up to 20X and delivers performance that is equivalent...

Lightbits awarded U.S. patent for NVMe/TCP overprovisioning

Lightbits Labs, a start-up based in San Jose, California focused on NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP) software-defined storage, has been assigned a patent (11,03,6626) for “a method and system to determine an optimal over-provisioning ratio.”The abstract of the patent (11,03,6626) published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: A system and a method of managing over-provisioning (OP) on non-volatile memory (NVM) computer storage media including...


Israel Electric Corp invests in Prisma Photonics for fiber sensing

Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) has made a strategic investment in Prisma Photonics, a start-up based in Tel Aviv that is developing optical monitoring solutions.

The PrismaPower is a fiber optics based electrical overhead powerline monitoring solution. As part of the collaboration with IEC, the Prisma Photonics system was deployed on IEC's transmission grid. It identifies safety incidents such as compromising or climbing power towers, electrical issues, short circuits, and partial electric discharges. It also alerts for unusual weather events such as strong winds, lightning hits near the lines, etc. In addition, the electro-optical fiber monitoring further protects against physical cyber-hacking of the communication infrastructure.

By leveraging IEC's optical fiber network, PrismaPower monitors 100 km of grid for electrical faults, physical damage to power towers and transmission lines, and extreme weather conditions. The system tracks faults and events right down to the power tower closest to the source of the problem.

"Having your strategic customer as your strategic partner is the strongest vote of confidence a company can hope for," added Dr. Eran Inbar, Prisma Photonics' CEO. "As an innovative corporation, IEC started collaborating with us six months ago. The current investment supports its commitment to advancing Israel's power supply industry through innovation. To date, our system has transformed the optical fiber infrastructure deployed on IEC's high-voltage grids into a sequence of extremely sensitive sensors that identify issues and track their precise location down to the nearest power tower level in real-time and with no need for placing additional sensors along the transmission lines."


Prisma Photonics raises $20 million for fiber sensing

Prisma Photonics, a start-up based in Tel Aviv, announced $20 million in a Series B funding for its optical monitoring solutions.

Prisma Photonics said its fiber sensing works by transmiting optical pulses down a fiber. A minute fraction of light is reflected from each point along the fiber. The system measures the reflected light to determine the strain, temperature, pressure, and other quantities over hundreds of kilometers of fiber with sub-meter resolution.

The funding round was led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, with participation from SE Ventures (Schneider Electric's venture capital arm) and Future Energy Ventures, the venture capital investment and collaboration platform of E.ON. This brings the total funding raised by Prisma Photonics to over $30 million. The company's earlier investors include i3 Equity Partners and Chione Switzerland.

Prisma Photonics customers manage thousands of kilometers of infrastructures, among them New York Power Authority, Israeli Natural Gas Lines, Israel Electric Corporation and other tier-1 utility operators). 

"With the demand for energy on the rise, utility operators find it harder to keep their assets operating smoothly and safely. It is a challenge to monitor and maintain these long infrastructures," said Dr. Eran Inbar, Prisma Photonics CEO. "Our Machine Learning based solutions are unique as we address this huge scale challenge with ease and accuracy. The investment is a vote of confidence from Insight Partners and a first of its kind in a new domain of critical infrastructure management."

https://www.prismaphotonics.com


Arrcus cites 80% growth in bookings in Q1

Arrcus, a privately-held company that develops networking software for core-to-edge network infrastructure, reported an 80% YoY growth in books for Q1 2022.

The company cited its largest seven-figure recurring revenue software subscription transaction with a leading financial services company.

In addition, Arrcus announced two new executive appointments. Sanjay Kumar has been appointed vice president of marketing and product management and Sreekanth Kannan takes on a newly created role on the management team as vice president focusing on the company’s growing cloud and multi-cloud networking business.

Kumar previously held leadership roles in product management and product/corporate marketing at such leading companies as Aruba Networks (HPE), Broadcom, Cisco Systems and IP Infusion. 

Kannan previously worked in product management and marketing roles at large companies like Cisco and VMware and as a startup executive for over a decade with successful companies like Aerohive Networks, Aviatrix, Megh Networks (a cloud-native networking company that he cofounded) and VeloCloud Networks.

“Our momentum in Q1 2022, following our high growth in 2021, demonstrates that the Arrcus value proposition strongly resonates with service providers and enterprises,” said Shekar Ayyar, CEO and chairman at Arrcus. “Our list of marquee customers is growing each quarter.”




Lumentum ships first multi-junction VCSEL arrays for LiDARs

Lumentum introduced its M Series multi-junction VCSEL arrays for next-generation automotive, industrial LiDAR, and 3D sensing applications..

Lumentum's automotive qualified, high-performance M Series features peak powers suited for short- and long-range advanced mobility and industrial LiDAR applications. In addition to higher available power densities, extensive accelerated life testing of the multi-junction M Series has shown the same high reliability as single junction VCSEL devices already in volume production. 

The first M Series product is a 905 nm 70 W multi-junction VCSEL array.

"The Lumentum M Series enable automotive and industrial customers to accelerate the development of next-generation LiDAR systems," said Alex Ju, Product Line Manager for 3D Sensing at Lumentum. "The M51-100, with its extremely small size, is a versatile solution applicable to a wide range of customer systems. We are excited to deliver industry-leading VCSEL technology with proven quality and volume manufacturing capability into the advanced mobility space and enable a greater range of industrial applications."

https://www.lumentum.com

Lumentum to acquire NeoPhotonics for $918M amidst strong demand

Lumentum agreed to acquire NeoPhotonics for $16.00 per share in cash, representing a total equity value of approximately $918 million and a premium of approximately 39% to NeoPhotonics' closing stock price on November 3, 2021.The companies cited significant next-gen 400G+ opportunities as a leading driver for the merger.NeoPhotonics, which was founded in 1996 and is based in San Jose, is a leading supplier of tunable lasers and optoelectronic components,...


U.S. Space Force taps Space Micro for GEO lasercom erminals

The U.S. Space Force awarded a contract to Space Micro Inc. to build a GEO-capable µLCT secure laser communications terminal that could be used as an OISL (Optical Inter-Satellite Link), a spacecraft to ground link, or a spacecraft to UAV link. 

This new award builds on an initial development contract the U.S. Air Force issued to Space Micro in 2019. This initial contract and subsequent modifications provided funding for Space Micro to update the current µLCT design specifically for this mission and to provide communications interoperability to existing systems. Space Micro delivered an engineering model to Space Force in late 2021.The µLCT Space Micro will deliver to Space Force under this contract will be a 10 cm system capable of providing full duplex GEO to GEO crosslinks at 40,000 km.

"Space Micro continues to model what successful private and public partnerships can look like, and how impactful they can be not only for our own capabilities, but the broader industry as a whole" said Matthew Kuta, President and COO, Voyager. "We're so proud to see the team's hard work continue to be recognized."

http://www.spacemicro.com

  • Space Micro recently announced an award from the Space Development Agency for a 24-month development contract for advanced one-to-many optical communications using Managed Optical Communication Array (MOCA) technology to support Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations. Space Micro was also selected by AFWERX, a U.S. Air Force Organization that works with commercial tech firms, to develop an air-to-space laser communications pod that could be deployed on military aircraft or unmanned drones to provide in-flight connectivity.