Having debuted its initial approach to co-packaged optics (CPO) at last year’s OFC (see "Ranovus announces single chip Odin silicon photonic engines for pluggable optical transceivers, co-packaged optics"), Ranovus Inc. is using OFC 2021 to announce a second-generation CPO optical engine. The Odin Analog-Drive CPO 2.0 Optical Engine offers significant cost and power savings over the first generation, Ranovus asserts. The company has again partnered with with IBM Inc., TE Connectivity, and Senko Advanced Components, Inc. to create a nx100G PAM4 CPO ecosystem based on the analog-drive version of Odin.
As the name implies, the new version of Odin leverages an analog drive approach rather than the digital drive of the previous generation. The analog approach obviates the need for retimers and therefore reduces cost and power consumption by 40% as well as chip footprint, Ranovus asserts. The new Odin also leverages the company’s 100-Gbps silicon photonics based Micro Ring Resonator modulators and photodetectors, a 100-Gbps driver, 100-Gbps transimpedance amplifier (TIA) and control circuity packaged in a single electronic-photonic IC (EPIC).
Contrary to what Lightwave erroneously reported in its recent digital edition cover story, the Odin EPIC leverages an external laser source, according to Hamid Arabzadeh, chairman, president, and CEO of Ranovus. The company plans to introduce a compatible laser source later this year, he added. That source might be placed on a separate shelf and connected via a four-connector system. In the other direction, the new design enables reuse of existing 100G PAM4 and PCIe SerDes chips instead of requiring a new XSR SerDes chip for connectivity, which the switch chip community favors, Arabzadeh asserted.
Arabzadeh added that he expects customer trials of the new analog-drive based approach to begin in the fourth quarter of this year.
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