Infinera revealed a new line of coherent optical subsystems and coherent pluggable optical engines that position the vendor ahead of rivals, in part due to the vendor's ownership of its personal indium phosphide (InP) optical semiconductor fabrication plant, Infinera SVP of Marketing Rob Shore told SDxCentral.

Infinera uses its U.S.-based fab to create the InP-based lasers used in every type of optical networking transmission application. Shore explained InP is the "only material that can produce light at a power level sufficient for optical transmissions and with the appropriate characteristics that you need to transmit light over fiber."

The executive claimed Infinera, because it owns that fab, does "a lot more in InP than anybody else, [more than] a lot of other people, Ciena included." The alternative is to use cheaper silicon, but "then they have to take InP produced by somebody else and graft it to their silicon," Shore said. "And there's obviously limitations when you do things that way," he added.

One of those limitations is space. Pluggable optic components are about the size of a thumb drive, meaning "every square millimeter is extremely precious," Shore said. Piecing together discrete or separate components isn't too big of a deal on a larger piece of real estate, but it becomes much more challenging on the pluggable scale.

To that point, Shore claimed Infinera "can build about 90% of the functions of these optical front ends on a single chip," which ends up being the size of a penny. "We can do that because there [are] a lot of functions that can only be done in InP. And then there [are] a bunch of functions you could potentially do with a variety of different materials. So again, people that don't have their own fab, they use different materials because it's hard to get [InP], and they're cheaper to do in silicon."

The vendor's InP fab is also the star of its new transmit-receive optical sub-assemblies (TROSAs) building blocks, which are made possible by the material. Building a majority of functions with InP leads to "much better performance than gluing a bunch of pieces together," because there tend to be "losses that you incur with it between all these different components," Shore explained. "We don't have any of that stuff, so we end up with a much more powerful, much higher performance TROSA than what anybody else can do."

Shore explained Infinera's new line of TROSAs, DSPs, and pluggable optical transceivers help improve energy efficiency with the shift to a lower order node process and shrinking DSP size.

The vendor's previous ICE6 optical engine used seven nanometer (nm)-based technology, but the 1.2 Tb/s ICE7 has been upgraded to five nm. That represents power per bit savings of 60% and cost per bit savings of 30%. Since "the transistors are getting a little closer together," ICE7 can provide the same amount of processing power in less physical space than ICE6, Shore explained.

Another way the ICE7 optical engine addresses environmental sustainability is with the initial integration of the TROSA technology. While ICE6 relied on discrete components, ICE7 will utilize "this really compact, efficient TROSA," he noted. Shore also touted the new optical engine's higher baud rate, which allows for more information to be transmitted using a single optical engine.

"We continue to evolve and improve the way we design these boards," he noted.