News: Optoelectronics
3 October 2023
DustPhotonics unveils first merchant single-chip 800G DR8 photonic integrated circuit
At the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2023) in Glasgow, Scotland, UK (2–4 October), DustPhotonics of Modi’in, Israel — which was founded in 2017 and develops silicon photonics technology and solutions — has announced what is claimed to be the industry’s first merchant single-chip 800G DR8 photonic integrated circuit (PIC). DustPhotonics has multiple live demos of this product highlighting its operation in several applications at booth #644.
The 800G PIC is a single-chip solution suitable for DR8 and DR8+ applications, providing eight optical channels independently modulated at 100Gb/s for an aggregate bandwidth of 800Gb/s. The chip is designed into a compact 7.5mm x 7mm package, enabling it to be used in industry-standard QSFP- and OSFP-style form factors. The device is suitable for reaches up to 2km in applications including hyperscale data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) clusters.
The PIC includes on-chip lasers, incorporating DustPhotonics’ patented L3C (low-loss laser coupling) technology, whereby off-the-shelf lasers from different manufacturers can be integrated with the PIC. This is said to allow advantages in product performance, cost, power and supply chain scalability.
DustPhotonics is demonstrating this device in multiple configurations including a traditional 800GBASE-DR8 application, an immersion cooling application, and a reduced-reach application. The immersion cooling demo showcases how this chip is suited to being immersed in a liquid coolant, since there is no free-space interface between the laser and PIC or at the fiber attach interface at the optical output of the chip. For the reduced-reach application, DustPhotonics is demonstrating a second, cost-optimized version of the product suitable for transceivers or active optical cables (AOCs) up to 100m, or for linear-drive pluggable optic (LPO) applications.
“We are seeing a lot of customer traction for this 800G application,” says CEO Ronnen Lovinger. “We are well-positioned for the next phase of the company, which is to scale into high-volume manufacturing,” he reckons.
“We have been encouraged by the growth of the 800Gb/s market, and we believe DustPhotonics single-chip PIC solution will help fuel adoption while easing some of the early supply chain constraints we are seeing in the industry,” comments Vladimir Kozlov, founder & CEO of optical communications market research firm LightCounting.
The device is sampling to customers now and is expected to be in production by first-quarter 2024
