The growth in mega data centres is also fuelling expansion of the companies that supply them with optics.
Optical transceiver company ColorChip, has secured an additional $17 million on top of the $20 million in investment received last summer (see Integrated optics start-up ColorChip raises another $20M).
The latest financing was led by CIRTech fund, an Israeli venture capital firm, joined by Scale-Up fund. Alex Lazovsky, managing partner at CIRTech Fund and Scale-Up, has joined ColorChip’s board.
The new capital will be used to accelerate go-to-market initiatives, expand ColorChip’s manufacturing capabilities and fuel research and development.
ColorChip has hired 100 additional team members in the past 12 months, bringing its headcount to 300, and expects an additional 50 employees to join during 2017.
Lazovsky said: “ColorChip’s optical transceiver solutions have been recognised for exceptional efficiency and reliability and are being deployed and trusted by leading mega data centres worldwide. The unique features of the SystemOnGlass architecture gives ColorChip a clear advantage and pave its way to a leading position in this market.”
The company recently reported that it is shipping in volume a 100G QSFP28 CWDM4 module, which is “OCP accepted”. This means it has been designed for and accepted by Facebook’s Open Compute Project, which has more relaxed specifications for reach, loss budget and temperature than traditional telecom transceivers. ColorChip’s module has a power consumption of only 2.6W and operates over a distance of 500m.
ColorChip plans to release several new products over the next two years, with recent demonstrations at OFC 2017 last month offering clues about what those might be. The company showed the building blocks for 200G transceivers in two different styles: one using CWDM4 combined with PAM4 in the QSFP56 form factor, and the other a 2x100G “two in a box” CWDM4 design that could be packaged in either QSFP-DD or OSFP.
Yigal Ezra, ColorChip’s CEO, said: “The space of web 2.0 and cloud providers is growing at an unprecedented rate and ColorChip solutions and roadmap are in high demand. The company is building capabilities to support mega data centres in the US and Asia, while developing next-generation 400G solutions.”
