Infinera Unveils Plans for 2.4Tbps PICs

Spring is the season for new optical gear, and especially the week of OFC.  And this year, Infinera is taking the opportunity to unveil the technology that will underly the third generation of its PIC-powered DWDM products, the Infinite Capacity Engine.  

The underlying platform will support scale of 2.4Tbps per superchannel and 26.4Tbps per fiber pair by leveraging 200G wavelength and 28nm technologies.  And it can reach distances between regeneration of up to 12,000km, enough to cross the longest subsea routes.  It can’t do both at the same time of course, and in between are a myriad of potential supported combinations of modulation formats, channel spacings, sliceable superchannels, SDN controls, and in-flight wire-speed encryption capabilities.

Infinera will be building its next generation of products off of this new Infinite Capacity Engine base, from the data center interconnect out to the metro and up to the longhaul, with the first actual product expected to be revealed before the first half is over.  That will be 5 years since the company’s 100G-based DTN-X, which itself came 6 years after the first 10G PICs were unveiled.  With 10G they were a late arrival to an established market, with 100G the wait was shorter but felt longer, but this time they look to break from the gate well in advance of the real demand.

They aren’t alone of course, as all vendors are putting their own portfolios in place for the next generation.  There’s a lot less uniformity of approach when it comes to technology this time though, and the exact combination each applies to the problem is going to to vary pretty widely in the early stages.

 

 

 

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Categories: Telecom Equipment