Ekinops joins 100-Gbps club

France-based optical systems vendor Ekinops has unveiled its plans to support 100-Gbps transmission requirements. The company’s initial plans focus on a “pizza box” platform that can operate as either a muxponder or transponder.

According to Rob Adams, vice president of product marketing/product line management at Ekinops, the new platform will leverage OIF-standard dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) with coherent detection when it becomes commercially available later this year. However, since metro applications are among the company’s targets, Adams says that the ability to accommodate other, potentially more economical modulation formats is in the company’s plans and could be rolled out sometime next year.

The 1RU system, part of the Ekinops 360 family, leverages the T-Chip technology the company has used in other platforms. The programmability of the T-Chip enables the system to be upgraded in the field and converted from a muxponder to a transponder (or vice versa) as requirements change, Adams says. The T-Chip also applies Ekinops’s proprietary DynaFEC forward error correction (FEC), which Adams says will complement and extend the capabilities of common hard-decision and soft-decision FEC approaches.

For muxponder applications, the system will support a variety of interfaces, with 8G Fibre Channel most likely the lowest-rate interface that the company will target initially, Adams expects. However, it will offer the ability to support 12 SFP+ ports to enable aggregation of streams of lower than 10 Gbps.

The pizza-box approach reflects Ekinops’s belief that 100-Gbps requirements will remain at low volumes for the near term. However, the company also has a chassis-based approach that it plans to offer by the middle of next year, according to Adams.

For more information on high-speed transmission systems and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyers Guide.