Hengtong, a fiber and power equipment manufacturer in Suzhou, announced volume production of a 400 Gbps silicon photonic transceiver. (Below.) The company sales in 2020 are US$4 billion, including fiber, power cables, and a marine division it bought from Huawei a year ago.
The 400G QSFP-DD DR4 is a high-performance, state-of-the-art module delivered as a very small quad (4-channel) small form-factor pluggable unit. It is comparable to the best of Cisco and Arista.
China is no longer dependent on the U.S. for any components. It does need Taiwan or Korea to produce the most advanced chips, required for mobile phones. Taiwan in turn is dependent on ASML in the Netherlands for EUV equipment, not the U.S.
Mobile phones are the only major product affected by the U.S. blockade. They require the smallest and most power-efficient chips possible. Everything else can be produced in China – like 400G modules – or other Asian countries.
Morris Chang, founder of TSMC, may be correct that China is five years behind in making chips. That gap will rapidly close. Tsinghua University, one of the best engineering schools in the world, has just opened a school for semiconductors. People born in San Jose or San Diego are not smarter than those born in Shanghai.
There is explosive demand for high end switches for data centers and telco cores. China has over 200 million 5G phones and will have over 600 million by the end of 2022. Over 400 million Chinese have fiber home.
Alibaba has twice the sales of Amazon. Ali and Huawei are growing their clouds rapidly. It all needs switches.
Huawei has its own 400G switch.
Hengtong Optic-Electric Releases 400G DR4 Silicon Photonic Transceiver, Enriching 400G Transceiver Module Product Series
2021-03-30 872 Font size:
On March 26th 2021, Hengtong Optic-Electric Co., Ltd. convened a new product launch. Its subsidiary company Hengtong Rockley Technology Co., Ltd. moved forward to enrich its high-speed transceiver modules for data communication. The mass production version of 400G QSFP-DD DR4 transceiver based on silicon photonic circuits and 400G QSFP-DD FR4 transceiver based on traditional free space solution were released, making Hengtong capable of providing customers with 400G single mode optical transceiver modules for different transmission distances.
The mass production version of 400G QSFP-DD DR4 silicon photonic transceivers released by Hengtong Rockley is based on the miniaturized silicon photonic integrated chips and electronic integrated chips made by Rockley Photonics Limited, which also utilize the most advanced 7nm DSP chip, the power consumption less than 9W. Furthermore, its manufacturing cost is 10-30% less than traditional 400G transceivers based on free space optics, satisfying the demand of low power consumption and environment-friendly requirement of data center applications. Hengtong’s 400G transceivers utilize chip-on-board (COB) assembly solution, and passive alignment is used for optical coupling between fiber and silicon photonic chips due to a unique fabrication process, which is beneficial to mass production and cost reduction. Hengtong Rockley will accelerate mass production on 400G QSFP-DD DR4 silicon photonic transceivers.
Silicon photonic integrated circuits are one of the best solutions to realize the monolithic integration of photonic chips and electronic chips, especially the 400G silicon photonic chips are an advanced technology to break the bottleneck of mega-scale data exchange, showing great advantages in low power consumption, small footprint, relatively low cost, easiness for large volume integration, etc. With the rapid development of the next generation information and communication technology, it brings explosive growth of data communications. The 400G silicon photonic transceivers are expected to replace the traditional transceivers which are incapable to some extent. Particularly, in the era of Co-Packaged Optics (CPO), the silicon photonic solution will become the best choice. In the meantime, Hengtong also released the first prototype of 3.2T CPO switch based on silicon photonic technology in China, which is an important milestone in silicon photonic industry.
In addition, Hengtong Rockley’s 400G QSFP-DD FR4 transceiver also utilizes 7nm DSP chip, EML is used in transmitter side, and InP detector is used in receiver side, with the help of low-cost and mature WDM photonic device, making the entire module design and layout very compact. The power consumption is less than 9W.
Cui Wei, Vice President of Hengtong Group, stated that the enterprise can keep sustainable development only by accelerating its innovation pace. In the future, Hengtong will continuously focus on the world’s most advanced technology trends, intensifying original innovation, self-made innovation and integrated innovation in critical areas, striving to build the system integration service provider in optical communications, intelligent energy, oceanic communications and the whole value chain of energy, driving the sustainable development of the industrial ecosystem.