NTT Electronics unveils 16-nm CMOS 100G/200G coherent DSP

NTT Electronics (NEL) has unveiled the newest member of its coherent transmission DSPs. The ExaSPEED 200 is a 16-nm device that supports both 100G QPSK long-haul and 200G 16QAM metro optical links.

The chip consumes "far less" than 10 W per 100 Gbps in its 200-Gbps operation mode, NEL asserts. This figure represents twice the power efficiency of the company's previous 20-nm 100G (see "NTT Electronics offers 200-Gbps coherent transmission DSP"). As was the case with the previous device, the new DSP leverages technology from Broadcom, specifically the 200G DSP core and 16-nm CMOS fin-FET mixed-signal technologies.

The ExaSPEED 200 also integrates enhanced forward error correction (EFEC) based on the de facto standard staircase code.

"Large service providers are moving towards SDN-based flexible optical transport architecture to dynamically manage, plan, provision, and re-optimize optical networks with substantially reduced cost," said Haruhiko Ichino, NEL executive vice president and general manager of the Broadband System & Device Business Group. "We are strongly committed to pioneering innovation in the coherent DSP in order to meet their expectation in flexible, software configurable optical ‘white box' elements that are modular, with interoperable subsystems from multiple vendors."

NEL says it will offer the ExaSPEED 200 with the Blade Design Suite, a suite of tools that includes a link performance simulator, reference design board, and Software Development Kit (SDK) that includes support of multivendor CFP2-ACO auto-calibration. The tool suite should help designers leverage the ExaSPEED 200 to create high-port-count transponder blades that can achieve 1 Tbps or higher capacity, NEL believes.

NEL plans to begin sampling the ExaSPEED 200 early in the second quarter of 2016. Production release should follow in the second half of this year.

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