Acacia Communications is sampling new 100G coherent pluggable solutions designed for optimisation in edge and access applications with unamplified links up to 120km. This marks a new market for the company, and for coherent moving into edge and access
Offered in a QSFP-DD form factor widely used for client-optics, Acacia’s new 100G coherent point-to-point (P2P) edge and access solutions were designed to provide network operators the ability to scale to higher data rates to meet growing bandwidth demands over some of the most challenging optical links, while also providing operational simplicity that may lead to overall network savings.
Coherent P2P solutions are tolerant to fibre types, chromatic dispersion, polarisation mode dispersion (PMD), and back reflections, which simplifies operational deployment. Acacia says that edge and access networks, particularly those offering 5G wireless and enterprise services, can benefit from coherent technology because its optical margins can handle the condition and reaches of the access fibre plant, resulting in shorter provisioning times. Solutions such as these are user friendly in deployment and provisioning due to low laser emission, wide tolerance range and rich monitoring and diagnostic features.
Pluggable coherent solutions in QSFP-DD were designed to enable network scalability to ensure that data rates can scale-up by leveraging the QSFP-DD slots with 200 and 400G versions in the future. Acacia’s 100G QSFP-DD P2P fixed wavelength hot pluggable module can operate over various types of unamplified single-mode edge and access fibre links up to 120km. The solution leverages the company’s 3D Siliconisation approach, which uses high-volume manufacturing processes.
Anuj Malik, director of product management at Acacia Communications said: ‘Acacia has a long-standing track record of driving coherent into new market applications by delivering the technology, scalability, feature set, and innovation that service providers need to maintain and grow their networks over time. Leveraging our 10 years of high-performance coherent transmission expertise, we specifically designed our new 100G coherent P2P solutions to meet the needs of edge and access applications in terms of form factor, power consumption and cost, building on our technology leadership in silicon photonics and low-power DSPs.’
