Infinera Marks PIC Hours

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- The Infinera photonic integrated circuit (PIC) has surpassed one million hours of successful field operations without a single PIC failure. The PICs' record of reliability, stretching over a year of operations at hundreds of customer sites on three continents, demonstrates the maturity, quality, and dependability of the innovative PIC technology.

The Infinera PIC consolidates all the key optical components used in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical transport systems onto a single chip smaller than a fingernail. Each Infinera PIC can send or receive ten channels of data at 10 Gigabits per second (Gb/s), for total bandwidth of 100 Gb/s, ten times the data rate of competitors' comparable optical networking systems.

"The PIC's reliability has been even better than we could have hoped for," said Fred Kish, Infinera Vice President of PIC Development and Manufacturing. "This is evidence that a key principle of the silicon semiconductor world also applies to photonic ICs: integration enables you to eliminate hundreds of wire or fiber connections, removing points of failure and dramatically increasing reliability."

Integration Economics
The Infinera DTN optical networking system is the first optical networking system based on a PIC and Infinera's PICs are the first large-scale photonic integrated circuits ever deployed in telecom networks. The compact size and large bandwidth capacity of the PIC enables service providers to deploy Digital Optical Networks, which provides them with the scalability of DWDM, flexibility of digital bandwidth management, and simplicity of GMPLS-based networking intelligence, all at greater cost-effectiveness than traditional optical networking systems.

Infinera's PICs are manufactured at Infinera's semiconductor fabrication facility at its Sunnyvale, California headquarters. The Infinera team pioneered new designs and techniques in the production, test and quality control of PICs in order to achieve production yields and quality levels that can be cost-effective in today's marketplace.

"The cost and performance of the PIC will continue to improve," said Infinera CEO and co-founder Jagdeep Singh. "The economics of integrating multiple optical devices onto a chip gives us very significant opportunities to continue to drive performance up and costs down."

"In time, every cost-effective scalable optical network will be based on photonic integrated circuits," Singh added.

Infinera Corp. (Nasdaq: INFN)