Our seventh annual Lightwave Innovation Reviews follows our standard format. We invited technology developers to submit products in various technology categories for review by our independent panel of judges in time for OFC 2020. In some cases, that brought entries for products that will be introduced at this year's show.
Lightwave Editorial Director Stephen Hardy, in his role as Award Program Manager, assigned each entry to be reviewed by at least three judges knowledgeable in the relevant technology or application. As was the case in previous years, they rated each entry on the following scale:
- 0-1: Useful product, yet commodity
- 2-3: Solid product with viable attributes
- 3-4: Excellent product with technical features and performance that provide clear and substantial benefits
- 4-5: Superb product that sets new standard for performance and provides groundbreaking and new technical milestones.
This year’s panel included:
- Robert Blum, director, strategic marketing and business development, Intel Corp.
- Brandon Collings, CTO, Optical Communications, CCOP, Lumentum
- Jorg-Peter Elbers, SVP, advanced technology, standards and IPR, ADVA Optical Networking
- Frank Effenberger, Vice President and Fellow, Access Advanced Technologies, Futurewei Technologies
- Mike Frankel, Ciena Fellow, Ciena
- Jim Hayes, President, Fiber Optic Association
- Lisa Huff, principal analyst, Optical Components, OVUM
- Tom Issenhuth, principal at Issenhuth Consulting
- Peter Jones, Principal Engineer, Cisco
- Vladimir Kozlov, founder and CEO, LightCounting
- Patrick McLaughlin, editor in chief, Cabling Installation & Maintenance
- Bethany Rüddek, RTPM, program advisor/R&D, Concert Technologies
- Jim Theodoras, vice president of R&D, HGGenuine USA.
- Matt Traverso, Principal Engineer, Cisco
- Ken Williams, Director, HFC Evolution and Standards. WOW!
- Dr. Tiejun J. (TJ) Xia, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Verizon
And, as has been tradition, we honor the following entries for achieving a score of at least 3.5 on that 1 to 5 scale. Congratulations to all of the companies listed below – and be sure to look for these companies at OFC 2020 to find out more.
Carrier Fiber, Cable, Enclosures, and Accessories
Go!Foton PEACOC High Density Compact Wireline-Wireless Terminal
Ripley Tools Miller ACS+ Cable Slitter for Armored Cables
STL Next Generation Bend Insensitive A2 Fiber - Stellar
STL High Fiber Count Ribbon and Cables - TruRibbon
Wirewerks Zayo Group Switches to New NextSTEP Fiber Distribution Frame
Communications Semiconductors and Electrical ICs
InPhi Porrima Gen2 PAM4 400-Gbps Platform
MaxLinear MxL93516 100G PAM4 DSP with EA-EML Integrated Driver
Microchip Technology META-DX1 1.2-Tbps Ethernet PHY with MACsec and FlexE
Data Center Fiber, Cable, Enclosures and Accessories
Sumitomo Electric Industries AirMT Ferrule: Non-Contact Multi-Fiber Interconnect
Data Center Interconnect Platforms
Consortium for On Board Optics Delta Open Networking Platform COBO PoC
Field Test Equipment
AFL Splicer Accessory Management via Bluetooth
Anritsu Co. Network Master Pro MT1000A
Keysight Technologies N4891A 400GBASE FEC-Aware Receiver Test Solution
LightRiver intelligent Factory Built Network
Spirent Communications Spirent 400G 1U Appliance
Viavi Solutions DWDM Optical Channel Checker module (OCC-4056C)
Viavi Solutions Network & Service Companion (NSC-100)
Viavi Solutions ONMS for PON Construction and Activation
Viavi Solutions ONMS Tunable DWDM Fiber Network Management Solution
FTTx Systems
ADTRAN 10G Fiber Access Portfolio
Lab/Production Test Equipment
Anritsu Co. Signal Quality Analyzer-R MP1900A
Coherent Solutions BERTPXIe - Bit Error Rate Tester
EXFO Full-band combiner (FBC) on the CTP10 Component Test Platform
Spirent Communications Spirent FlexE-100
Sumix Side+Front View for MPO Geometry & Guide Holes Parallelism
Viavi Solutions VIAVI MAP-300 Optical Manufacturing Test Platform
Viavi Solutions VIAVI ONT-800 Optical Network Test Platform
Xena Networks ApS Vantage Ethernet Production Line Tester
Optical Components
II-VI Inc. FOXQ6411C1BL IC-TROSA
Lumentum S32, S29, M31, and M29 Series 980 nm Pump Modules
Senko Advanced Components Waterproof LC
Suncall America MPO Internal Shutter Adapter with SC Footprint
Optical Transceivers and Transponders
II-VI Inc. 25-Gbps Wavelength Tunable SFP28 Transceiver
Inphi COLORZ II 400ZR Pluggable Transceiver
ProLabs Multi-Code Optical Transceivers
Optical Transport Systems
ECI Telecom Apollo OPT9904X Pay-as-you-Grow Edge OTN/Packet Switch
Fujitsu Network Communications 1FINITY L220 CDC Add/Drop Blade
Fujitsu Network Communications 1FINITY S-Series Switch with Cloud Based Routing
Inphi Canopus 7-nm DSP Enabling 400G Coherent Pluggables
ZTE Large OTN Switching Platform Based on E-OTN Solution