Inphi Corp. (NYSE: IPHI) said it has begun shipping the production version of its M200 LightSpeed-III coherent digital signal processor (DSP). The device features what the company asserts is ultra-low power and high performance to support 100G and 200G data rates for long-haul, metro, and data center interconnect (DCI) applications. Several Tier 1 OEMs have committed to commercial deployments of the M200 offering in the second half of 2018, says Inphi.
The M200 is the first offering in Inphi's 16-nm LightSpeed-III SoC device family, using Inphi's DSP and FEC technology, and its internal analog expertise and SerDes IP. The M200 DSP supports two host SerDes with selectable 10-Gbps and 28-Gbps NRZ interfaces with 100G client FEC termination. According to Inphi, this eliminates the need for external gearboxes. The M200 also has FIPS compliant AES256 encryption, Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) monitoring, and OTN overhead processing to enable affordable, high-density metro and DCI platforms.
Additionally, the M200 enables OSNR performance of 17.5 dB for 200G 16QAM, which is crucial to enable the large-scale transition from 100G to 200G in metro networks, Inphi attests. To provide this performance while enabling spectral efficiency that is 30% higher than 8QAM-based competitors, M200 uses 16QAM modulation.
According to Inphi, the M200 enables 200G deployments on legacy and current networks that have been deployed with 50-GHz grid spacing, and maximizes the number of ROADM nodes covered, while eliminating the need for electrical regeneration.
"Power at the required performance, density, and cost per bit are drivers for rapid expansion of metro networks," said John Lively, principal analyst for market research firm LightCounting. "The M200 family of ultra-low power and high-performance coherent DSP provides the power and performance flexibility required to enable lower cost optical system architectures based on CFP2-DCO, CFP-DCO, and dense line card form factors."
Inphi began sampling the LightSpeed-III M200, which is the company's first coherent DSP offering derived from its acquisition of coherent DSP pioneer ClariPhy Communications, in September 2017 (see "Inphi to buy coherent DSP developer ClariPhy Communications for $275 million" and "Inphi sampling LightSpeed-III M200 100G/200G coherent DSP").
The company says OEMs and module partners will be using the M200 on line cards with CFP2-DCO coherent modules, within CFP-DCO and CFP2-ACO optical transceivers, and on discrete line card implementations.
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