14 DAY TRIAL // At the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Rome, Intel revealed the specs of their new silicon photonics receivers designed to provide communications service and cloud providers with the hardware to support 5G wireless network expansion.
As stated in Intel's press release, the new 100G silicon photonics transceivers are designed out of the box to fit the bandwidth requirements of next-gen 5G wireless network infrastructure while also being able to face the most severe environmental conditions.
Intel's Silicon Photonics 100G CWDM4 (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing 4-lane) QSFP28 Optical Transceiver with Extended Temperature comes with dual rate 40Gbps/100Gbps CPRI and eCPRI and with more than 10 km duplex single-mode fiber reach.
Furthermore, the low power consumption 100G CWDM4 transceiver is capable of operating at a temperature range of -20 to 85°C with a maximum of 3.5W power dissipation.
The newly unveiled weather-hardened transceiver is capable of providing high-speed 5G connectivity for enterprise data centers and large-scale cloud providers, as well as operate with any other types of equipment using router, Ethernet switch, and client-side telecom interfaces.
Intel also revealed specifics about their 400 Gbps silicon photonics
100G CWDM4 transceiver's 10km range will also allow wireless carriers to build upon already existing fiber optic networks which use 4G connectivity and boost their speeds to 100 Gbps to have them ready to take on the much faster 5G network traffic.
During ECOC, Intel also unveiled more details on their 400 Gbps silicon photonics, previously demoed at the Optical Fiber Conference in March.
The tech company will begin delivering 400 Gbps DR4 silicon photonics module samples to customers starting with Q4 ‘18, while production will begin volume production in 2H ’19.
"By extending this technology outside the data center and into 5G infrastructure at the edge of the network, we can provide the same benefits to communications service providers while supporting 5G fronthaul bandwidth needs,” said Dr. Hong Hou, vice president, and general manager of Intel’s Silicon Photonics Product Division.
