Acacia Communications : Edge and Access Pluggables Honored in Lightwave’s Innovation Reviews

By Lisa Crewe|Posted on March 24, 2021

This week, Lightwave once again recognized the most innovative products impacting the optical communications community with its annual Lightwave Innovation Reviews. Acacia is proud to have its edge and access pluggable coherent modules portfolio score a 4.5 out of 5 in the optical transceivers and transponders category.

The benefits of coherent have already been demonstrated in the metro, long-haul and submarine markets. With 5G and edge computing roll outs, the time is right for coherent optics to take the next step and migrate to edge and access networks. This market can benefit from the scalability, operational simplicity and improved total cost of ownership that coherent has to offer. In 2020, Acacia began customer sampling of a portfolio of product solutions designed to address a wide variety of requirements in the edge and access market. The portfolio includes:

Examples of different connectivity solutions in the service provider edge/access portion of the network.

100G Coherent Dedicated Point-to-Point (P2P) Fiber Edge and Access Solutions
Offered in a QSFP-DD form factor widely used for client-optics, Acacia's new 100G coherent dedicated point-to-point (P2P) fiber edge and access solutions were designed to provide network operators the ability to scale to higher data rates to meet growing bandwidth demands over some of the most challenging optical links, while also providing operational simplicity that may lead to overall network savings. These solutions were specifically designed for optimization in service provider edge and access applications with unamplified links up to 120km.

QSFP-DD 100G Coherent Point-to-Point (P2P) pluggable module

Compared to alternative direct-detect solutions, coherent P2P solutions are extremely tolerant to fiber types, chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion (PMD), and back reflections, which simplifies operational deployment. Service provider edge and access networks, particularly those offering 5G wireless and enterprise services, can benefit from coherent technology because it has ample optical margins which can easily handle the condition and reaches of the access fiber plant resulting in shorter provisioning times. Coherent P2P solutions are user friendly in deployment and provisioning due to low laser emission, wide tolerance range and rich monitoring and diagnostic features. Pluggable coherent solutions in QSFP-DD were designed to enable network scalability to ensure that data rates can scale-up by leveraging the QSFP-DD slots with 200G and 400G versions in the future.

Coherent Bi-Directional Pluggables for Cable and 5G Wireless X-Haul Applications
Acacia's coherent bi-directional pluggable optical module solutions were designed to transmit and receive data in both directions on a single fiber for 100G and beyond. Offered in a pluggable CFP2-DCO form factor, Acacia's coherent bi-directional module is designed to deliver an operationally efficient and cost-effective way for telecommunications and cable operators to increase capacity in fiber-limited networks.

CFP2-DCO Coherent Bi-Directional Pluggables

In cable networks, particularly Remote PHY and fiber deep applications, providers often run into situations where only a single fiber is available. Historically, these networks have been served by 10G bi-directional optical modules. To meet growing bandwidth demands, a coherent bi-directional solution can provide these networks with an upgrade path to 100G and beyond. When wireless networks are migrating from 4G LTE to 5G, fibers are more often constrained because of a large number of remote nodes and some fibers are utilized by existing services. In these instances, coherent bi-directional modules can alleviate both bandwidth and fiber constraints.

100G Coherent DWDM Pluggable Modules for Cable/Fiber Deep and 5G Wireless X-haul ApplicationsOffered in the QSFP-DD form factor, Acacia's new 100G coherent DWDM module was designed to provide a scalable traffic aggregation solution, as well as an upgrade path to migrate from existing 10G WDM networks to higher-performing 100G DWDM coherent links for new architectures in access networks. Acacia's pluggable coherent solutions in QSFP-DD were designed to enable network scalability to 200G and 400G versions in the future.

QSFP-DD 100G coherent DWDM pluggable Module

3D Siliconization Plus Proven Silicon Photonics and Coherent Transmission Expertise
This portfolio leverages Acacia's 3D Siliconization approach, which utilizes high-volume manufacturing processes and benefits from the maturity of Acacia's silicon photonics technology as well as its 11 years of high-performance coherent transmission expertise.

Thanks to Lightwave
From all of us at Acacia, we want to give a big thanks to the Lightwave judges for recognizing the innovation that went into the Acacia edge and access portfolio. This market has many different requirements, which required a range of solutions, and we are proud to bring these to our existing and new customers to help them meet their bandwidth demands.

If you want to learn more about Acacia's portfolio of edge and access pluggable solutions, please contact us.