Technology

Rockley Photonics has developed what it says is the world’s first single-chip L3 routing switch to directly integrate 100G network ports using single-mode fibre, and is now demonstrating its in-package optics platform to select customers and development partners.

Rockley Photonics has raised $40 million in its most recent round of funding, taking its total raised since its launch to $100 million. The company says that this will rapidly expand the design and production of its platform for high performance optical networking solutions, imaging and sensor photonics, and custom photonics for consumer applications.

VIAVI Solutions has partnered with Microsemi to enable flexible optical networking technologies to meet the demands of 5G networks, providing service providers globally with solution platforms to build, test and quickly deploy 5G-ready optical networks including OTUCn, Flexible OTN (FlexO) and Flexible Ethernet (FlexE) technologies.

The latest Photonic Service Engine (PSE) family of super-coherent digital signal processors, from Nokia, PSE-3, implements its probabilistic constellation shaping technique (developed two years ago) to push fibre-optic performance close to the Shannon limit.

Optical start-up Ranovus has announced general availability of its 200G on-board optics and CFP2 direct detect transceivers. It plans to demonstrate both devices in partnership with ADVA Optical Networking at the upcoming OFC Exhibition in San Diego, California.

Hyperoptic has carried out a trial of fast home broadband - touching 10Gb/s - at East Village, the site of the London 2012 Athletes’ Village. The company was able to demonstrate speeds it says are some 276 times faster than the average speed a UK consumer receives today, to a UK home, using an existing service provider network, rather than a new, dedicated line.

Nokia and Qualcomm have successfully completed standard-compliant key interoperability tests in the 3.5GHz and 28GHz spectrum, using the Nokia AirScale base station and device prototypes from Qualcomm Technologies.

Following these recent tests, and the agreement in September last year that they would collaborate on 5G new radio (NR), the businesses say that widescale 5G deployments could take place in 2019. This will be timely for commercial network launches in the United States, China, Japan, Korea and Europe.

Jisc is deploying Ciena’s 6,500 packet-optical platform powered by WaveLogic Ai coherent optics to provide unprecedented high-capacity 400G wavelength connectivity for the Janet Network. 

Verizon has completed a successful field trial delivering live 400Gb/s Ethernet traffic on a single wavelength between MPLS Core routers over its packet-optical network.

The trial demonstrated the interoperability between equipment from two different suppliers – Ciena and Juniper – alongside the capability to quadruple the typical capacity carried on one wavelength.

Ciena, Telstra and Ericsson have collaborated to achieve speeds over 61.5GHz spectrum on Telstra’s transmission network in Melbourne. The companies say that this demonstrates the highest spectral efficiency per fibre pair ever achieved in a live environment.