WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. -- Inphi Corporation, a privately held fabless optical components company, today announced its low-power, feature-rich OC-768 architecture for high-speed network applications. This architecture combines the speed of indium phosphide (InP) components with CMOS standards compliant components. It is designed to enable long haul equipment suppliers to build high-performance 43-50 gigabits per second (Gbps) linecards and to allow module manufacturers to develop cost-competitive solutions for short reach and metro applications at 40 Gbps. The Inphi chipset architecture interfaces the higher-level system functions such as SONET framing to the physical layer components, enabling electrical to optical and optical to electrical conversion. In the process, a 16-bit data bus operating at a data rate between 2.5 and 3.125 Gbps is converted to a high-speed serial stream operating between 40 and 50 Gbps. On the system side, a CMOS 16:4 mux and 4:16 demux provide skew compensation logic required to support the upcoming OIF SFI-5 standard. These CMOS components also include critical management functions such as real time diagnostics, testability, and fault isolation. On the line side, the architecture incorporates a 4:1 mux with an integrated clock multiply unit and a 1:4 demux with integrated clock and data recovery circuitry, both of which are designed in InP. InP technology enables robust OC-768 fiber optic links by ensuring that the physical layer electronics meet stringent performance criteria. For example, InP technology provides sufficient gain to drive the optics and enables rise and fall times of 8 picoseconds with very low jitter (less than 1 picosecond rms). "When designing the architecture, our strategy was to select the right technology for the right application," explained Dr. Gopal Raghavan, co-founder and CTO of Inphi Corporation. "In the case of OC-768, we believe the combination of CMOS and indium phosphide is the perfect match in terms of density, power consumption, and speed. CMOS meets the high gate count requirement for SFI-5 compliance, and indium phosphide meets the high-bandwidth, low-power requirements of OC-768 fiber optic links."Inphi Corp.