Bandwidth growth spurred by data center expansion and 5G network expansion is expected to drive demand for faster coherent dense wavelength division multiplexing pluggable optical devices.
Microchip Technology and Acacia are supporting this shift by bringing an interoperable set of solutions to market, The solution suite includes Microchip's Digi-G5 OTN processor, Meta-DX1 Terabit Secure Ethernet PHY, and Acacia's 400G plugable coherent optical system. Therefore, DCI and METRO OTN platforms are transitioning from 100/200g pluggable coherent optical modules to 400G pluggable coherent optical modules to support these hyperconnected architectures. The goal of the collaboration is to build an ecosystem that supports the 400ZR specification and 400G CFP2-DCO, QQSFP -DD and OSFP modules for OpenZR+ and Open ROADM MSA applications.
"Digi-g5 and META-DX1 enable our optical transport, IP routing and Ethernet switching customers to implement a new class of multi-TB OTN switching and high-density 100/400 GbE and FlexE line cards, "Our interoperability efforts with Acacia help demonstrate that there is an ecosystem for the mass deployment of these new line cards with plugable 400G coherent optics," said Babak Samimi, vp of Microchip Communications business Unit.
"By demonstrating that Acacia's 400G coherent module can interoperate with Microchip's Digi-G5 and Meta-DX1 devices, we see this as a powerful solution designed to address network capacity growth and improve efficiency," said Markus Weber, Senior director of DSP at Acacia. Acacia is now part of Cisco. "The compact size and power efficiency of our 400G OpenZR+ CFP2-DCO module is designed to help network operators deploy and extend high-bandwidth DWDM connectivity capabilities between data centers and metropolitan area networks."
