Kotura Inc., an industry leader in silicon photonics, today announced successful demonstration of their Echelle grating Mux and Demux for 500 Gb/s wavelength division multiplexing applications. The ½ Terabit-per-second demonstration, in partnership with CyOptics, marks the successful completion of the second year milestone as part of a three-year program called Terabit Photonic Integrated Circuits (TERAPICS).

The 12 channel Mux and Demux chips, designed and fabricated by Kotura, directly couple light from laser arrays and detectors into a single fiber, greatly simplifying the packaging, and eliminating the costly need for dozens of lens, isolators, laser monitors and Thermo-Electric Coolers (TECs).

“While much of the industry is developing 40 and 100 Gb/s Ethernet solutions, the next major step will be 500 Gb/s and one Terabit,” explains Arlon Martin, Vice President of Marketing at Kotura. “Server blades with multi-core CPUs and 10 Gb/s I/O ports are becoming more common, accelerating the need for higher speeds in the core of the data center.”

“Kotura has designed a large variety of WDM chips with small footprint, low cross-talk and low PDL,” added Mehdi Asghari, CTO of Kotura. “We have successfully fabricated designs from 4 to 40 channels, supporting wavelengths from 1200 to 1600 nm and channel spacings from 20 nm to 100 GHz. The ATP-CyOptics chips contain hybridization features for the laser arrays, a Gaussian filter on the laser side, and a flat-top filter on the detector side.”

The 500 Gb/s demonstration was performed at CyOptics, Kotura’s partner in the ATP NIST program.