Inphi Corporation announced the commercial availability and production ramp of COLORZ II 400ZR, the industry’s first QSFP-DD pluggable coherent transceivers for cloud data center interconnects (DCIs). For the first time, cloud operators can connect their data centers within a region with high performance, low power, small form factor 400G coherent transceivers without the need for a separate transport box. A longer reach variant, COLORZ II 400G ZR+, which extends the reach of COLORZ II from 120km to about 400km, is in final stages of qualification and expected to be commercially available starting next month. The ever-increasing bandwidth demand between data centers, driven by streaming video, social networking, cloud computing, AI, and, more recently, work from home, is motivating mega-cloud data center operators to deploy high-density, low latency and low power DWDM links to connect multiple data centers within region and allow them to behave like a single data center. Inphi’s COLORZ II represents the culmination of several important industry firsts: First 400G single-chip, coherent silicon PIC to include all transmit and receive functions; First low-cost, passive alignment of fiber to the PIC using traditional optics, eliminating the need for complex active alignment; First low-power, high-performance 7nm CMOS-based coherent DSP enabling 400ZR and 400ZR+ extended reach 100/200/300/400G modes; First integrated, industry-standard firmware management interface enabling full performance monitoring of DCI or transport systems without direct optical module support. 400ZR is an interoperable standard with broad industry support. Motivated by the need to lower the cost and power consumption of DCI, leading cloud operators, OEMs, and module and chip vendors have joined the Optical Interworking Forum in the development of an industry standard for 400ZR. COLORZ II 400ZR is the first pluggable module product available in volume designed for this standard. COLORZ II 400ZR and 400ZR+ enable a dramatic increase in switch rack capacity while reducing power consumption by up to 80%. COLORZ II delivers up to 14.4Tb of capacity per rack unit, compared to 2.4Tb or 3.6Tb per RU for competing solutions, representing a 4-6x increase in throughput per chassis. COLORZ II ZR and ZR+ achieve drastically improved density through higher levels of silicon photonics integration as well as much lower power consumption across all coherent transceiver elements.