Recently in Editor's blog Category

Earlier this year I was invited to visit London to find out how easy it is to set up and tear down optical connections, courtesy of the Infinera Express, which was setting off on a European roadshow. Living in a travel "not-spot" (it takes me the best part of three hours and three different forms of transport to get to London ), I had to decline.

But last Monday, while walking back from the sea front in Nice, I found the Infinera truck had come to me. This was great news for a couple of reasons: one, it meant I was in the right place for IIR's WDM & Next-Generation Optical Networking conference; and two, I would get to see this stuff up close after all.

A big purple truck...

San Diego Convention Centre

The official statistics are in: OFC/NFOEC in San Diego last week attracted 550 companies and around 9,500 attendees. Numbers are down a fair bit on last year when there were around 12,000 attendees, and some big name vendors chose to book meeting rooms instead of booths.

But while things were certainly quiet, they weren't uneventful. The key decision makers still attended, and business seemed to be getting done. For a show where everyone was talking about how there wasn't a lot going on, I certainly found plenty to interest me.

Here's a round-up of OFC/NFOEC news published on fibresystems.org:

Pre-show coverage:
Agilent gets up to speed on 100G modulation
ADVA tackles metro-optimized 100G
Ericsson trials 100G with Deutsche Telekom

From the event:
JDSU thinks big on tiny tunable
Optical components: can the industry be fixed?
Electronics takes centre stage
From the show floor: CIP
Thermal management: a hot topic
From the show floor: Fabrinet

This article will be updated as new content is added.

I'm a bit of a late bloomer where social media is concerned, but yesterday I finally got around to joining Twitter.

Well, it seems that I'm not a moment too soon. The Guardian is really showing us the potential of this platform by switching to Twitter and in future will tell all its news stories in 140 characters or less. Brilliant! I took that idea seriously for all of about 3 seconds before spraying my keyboard with coffee. All the same, the Guardian may have a point: it could really cut down my workload if FibreSystems were to adopt the same policy.

If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, you'll find me at http://www.twitter.com/paulinerigby. I'm sure that when I have something to say, it'll be worth it.

Reporting from Phoenix

Plenty of time today to mull on this week's OFC/NFOEC event, as I missed the connection to my UK flight, and am stuck in Phoenix, Arizona, for 24 hours. Trying to land in 62 mph cross winds was one of the more scarey experiences of my life; the pilot aborted the landing at the last minute and we were diverted to Tucson.

We (publisher Susan Curtis and I) arrived in the small hours at a slightly seedy hotel, the sort where you get disposable plates and cutlery for breakfast. Too depressing to stay in the hotel room and work, so we've gone hiking in South Mountain Park.

Cactii

This is the third time in three flights that I've been delayed overnight. The trip before that was by Eurostar, and my train was cancelled in both directions, leading to more delays. My colleagues swear they will make separate travel arrangements from me in future. So if you see me at the airport, you have been warned!

Nat Mani and the Fabrinet elephant

As the economic situation gets tougher for optics vendors, one company is poised to take advantage of the situation. Fabrinet is an optical foundry that has seen its business expand even as the optical components industry has shrunk from $15 billion a year in revenues down to just $1 billion.

"Our revenue is in lockstep with our customers," said Nat Mani, Fabrinet's executive vice-president of sales and marketing. "But of course [as customers feel the squeeze] outsourcing starts to look better and better to those customers."

"Quoting activity is as high as it has ever been," he added.

Outsourcing has been a key trend among optics suppliers since the telecoms bubble burst in 2001, as they look to save costs. Not only can vendors save on the high cost of setting up the fabrication facility in the first place, but they can offload the risk of periods of low demand onto the manufacturing partner. "The decision process used to take longer; now people come and see us and they get it," said Mani.

Typically these operations are located in countries with low-cost labour rates — in Fabrinet's case it's Thailand, which appears to be home to yellow elephants. That said, the skill of the workforce, not low-cost wages, was the biggest factor in the decision to set up in Thailand, according to Mani. Fabrinet was founded in 1999 by executives from the disk drive industry who saw similarities between disk drive manufacturing and optical manufacturing.

Fabrinet began operations by acquiring a facility from Seagate Technology in Bangkok, and has benefitted from the previous oversupply in the optics industry, picking up additional fabs from the likes of Finisar and JDSU at, presumably, knock down prices.

According to Mani, outsource penetration still has some way to go. Consolidation among Fabrinet's customer base, which has reduced the number of vendors in the marketplace but not their product portfolios, isn't really an issue. "The opportunity to consolidate fabs probably doesn't exist," he commented.

Fabrinet says its success lies in the "factory within a factory" model. Each customer gets a dedicated team to support them, so that they can be comfortable that they will get the attention they need — and that no company secrets are leaked to the factory "next door".

Lean manufacturing techniques — eliminating non-value-add steps in the assembly process, and the overhead associated with them — have been key to the company's strategy over the past six to seven years. Not only can this save time and money; too many steps in the production process leave it prone to lower quality because there are more "touch points". Fabrinet is now in the process of applying those same principles to create a "green" manufacturing initiative. This is a topic that we plan to cover in more detail in FibreSystems Europe in future, so stay tuned.

Components vendors are always trying to shrink the size of optical modules, this week's announcement of the tunable XFP being a good example of this trend. In doing so, the thermal management presents just as much of a challenge as the optics. In fact, the required power dissipation often determines the size of a module.

So I was very interested to meet with Nextreme, a company that's got an extremely efficient method of cooling optical chips. The material that it has developed can pump 10 to 20 times more heat than conventional thermoelectric coolers (TECs), and comes in a much smaller package. "In telecoms most of the money is in the packaging, and the way to get that out is to shrink the packaging. Our focus is to help people do that," said Paul Magill, the VP of marketing and business development for Nextreme.

Nextreme claims that its cooler is the only one that can fit inside a TO-56 can. A TO-56 can is 5.6mm wide, and represents the next step in shrinking optical transmitters; it's a lot smaller than the TOSA package that vendors normally use. Nextreme has also integrated its material into flip-chip solder bumps, and imagines that one day the material might become part of the packaging rather than an additional device that must be bought.

On one level, Nextreme's technology doesn't sound all that new. It's based on thin films of bismuth telluride, a material that's been used for years to make Peltier coolers. On the other hand, the capabilities of this material sound like are a significant enhancement on what was available before, which could make a difference to optics vendors.

Here's a video that Nextreme showed me:

If there's one company I look forward to talking to, it's the UK's Centre for Integrated Photonics (CIP), because they always seem to have something interesting going on. At ECOC last September, CIP wowed attendees with its demonstration of a 32-channel multi-wavelength laser. The component contained two 16-channel laser arrays, with each channel being directly modulated.

This device is aimed at WDM-PON applications, where a single transmitter could replace 32 separate devices and a modulator, allowing all the optics at the PON headend to be collapsed down onto a single linecard. One of the benefits of GPON and EPON technologies is that they simplify fibre management and economises on equipment space in the central office; the multi-wavelength laser could bring both of those benefits to WDM-PON equipment.

Now CIP has taken that idea further by adding a modulator array to its multi-wavelength laser to obtain better transmission performance. The device that CIP showed at OFC was a 10-channel laser array, containing two arrays of five lasers mounted on the same substrate. An array size of five was picked to optimize yield.

With 100G and coherent receivers, a lot of the complexity in the components moves from the optics to the electronics.

Ed Cornejo of Opnext tells me that the company is working on a coherent solution for 100 Gbit/s transmission, and will have a demonstration of this capability by the summer. The vendor is doing in-house development for the electronics piece of the puzzle, where much of the complexity lies; in Cornejo's view other optics companies will face a significant barrier if they don't have this expertise. Opnext's electronics know-how came from Stratalight of course, which started out as a subsystems developer, and had been working on digital signal processing prior to the merger with Opnext. "We should have the best cost structure of anyone doing 100G," he claims. "It's going to be lower cost than what's out there today, because we're doing it in CMOS."

One vendor that does have that electronics focus is CoreOptics, which is both a chip maker and a module maker, with experience in digital signal processing (DSP) coming from the development of MLSE algorithms for electronic dispersion compensation. The company issued a press release at the show claiming that it has validated its "coherent" technology for cost-effective 40G transmission (their quotation marks, not mine). What this means, I have absolutely no idea. CoreOptic's senior marketing folks were ensconced in a room with a systems vendor when I turned up to meet with them, so I'm still in the dark.

One thing I've learned this week is that, strictly speaking, "coherent" is a term that can be applied to any modulation scheme that uses phase to encode the information, whether the detection scheme is differential (comparing the phase of one bit with the next using optics) or uses a local oscillator laser and DSP to extract the signal. So CoreOptic's approach could be either.

You might expect one of the usual suspects — JDSU or Bookham — to be first out the gate with a tunable laser in the XFP form factor, but Emcore seems to have pipped them at the post.

Or has it? Emcore's announcement this morning says the company is "planning to release a full-band tunable XFP product line", but doesn't give a time-frame (see Emcore unveils industry's first tunable XFP optical transceiver).

That announcement could be roughly equivalent to the one JDSU made last year, when it unveiled its tunable transmitter chip (see JDSU shrinks tunable transmitter). JDSU told fibresystems.org it was working on a tunable XFP module that would be ready around the end of 2009. Although JDSU has been highly secretive about the press conference it's calling for tomorrow morning, the timing would be about right for that to be a tunable XFP.

Ciena and Nortel often share column inches, but usually they're mentioned in the same breath because both are struggling in the economic downturn.

But now a report on Bloomberg suggests that Ciena is sniffing around Nortel's Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) unit, which was originally put up for sale last September, then taken off the table last month. The suggested price is $300 million.

This latest development follows a report in the Wall St. Journal that Nortel is considering the sale of two of its largest business units.

Nokia Siemens Networks is said to be interested in acquiring Nortel's wireless-equipment business, while a string of firms, including Avaya, Siemens Enterprise Networks and private equity firm Gores Group, have been in talks to acquires Nortel's enterprise division, the report says.

The report also suggests that Nortel may be worth more if it is split up and sold for parts &mdash giving the Canadian vendor a good reason to reconsider its decision about the MEN division. Selling the wireless-equipment business, which generate a large part of the company's revenues, would also complicate any effort to emerge as a standalone company.

Nortel filed for credit protection on January 14, a process that requires the company's affairs be resolved in a way that delivers the maximum value to bondholders and others to whom it owes money. So far, Nortel has agreed to sell the Layer 4-7 business, comprising the products of the former Alteon Websystems, to Israeli firm Radware for a mere $17.65 million.

The restructuring process is expected to be completed by May 1st.