Acacia Unveils Coherent Flex-Rate 400G 5x7 Transceiver Module

LOS ANGELES -- Acacia Communications, the leader in delivering intelligent transceivers for ultra-high speed fiber optic transmission to the telecommunications infrastructure industry, today announced the AC-400, the industry’s first flex-rate coherent 400G Transceiver module. The announcement was made at OFC 2015. Acacia’s newest product is designed for LH/ULH, metro and Data Center Interconnect networks and reduces the size and power consumption, offering the most cost-effective solution for 100G, 200G and 400G transport.

“100G coherent transceivers are currently being deployed in large volumes in long haul, metro and Data Center Interconnect networks,” said Acacia Communications President and CEO Raj Shanmugaraj. “With the availability of Acacia’s low cost flex-rate coherent AC-400 MSA module, we expect to bring even better economies for coherent applications at multiple rates from 100G to 400G. Powered by the Acacia’s ASIC/DSP and extensive silicon photonic integration for metro and Data Center Interconnect applications, we have been able to extend the performance advantages of an AC-400 module while reducing cost, size and power consumption dramatically. Our new AC-400 provides carriers and content providers with a compelling solution to cost-effectively address capacity needs in their ULH/LH, metro and Data Center Interconnect networks.”

“The ability to launch 400G off a 5x7 Transceiver Module with advanced features like 8QAM and low power is well timed with the growth of the Data Center Interconnect transport market and Acacia’s flexibility to scale from 100G to 400G is a major advantage,” said Simon Stanley, Contributing Analyst, Heavy Reading. “The module demonstrates Silicon Photonics PIC performance for the higher order modulation schemes and makes solutions like these very cost-effective for the market.”

The coherent AC-400 transceiver is powered by the industry’s first dual-core ASIC supporting two optical channels and up to 400Gbit/s capacity including a clear channel single 400Gbps traffic flow, optimized for IP packet transport. Built-in framing functionality supports 100G and 400G OTN and Ethernet clients.

“Continuous DSP and FEC innovations have enabled us to reduce the power consumption to a level where it’s possible to do all the necessary signal processing and error correction for two channels on a single ASIC without compromising performance,” said Acacia’s Co-founder and Director of DSP Development, Christian Rasmussen. “In fact, our fourth-generation DSP and FEC provide industry leading soft-decision FEC performance and an additional performance gain through absolute phase encoding. Furthermore, the ability to choose from multiple modulations formats including QPSK, 8QAM, and 16QAM enables our customers to optimize the reach, spectral efficiency and cost of their systems.”

Acacia’s coherent AC-400 MSA modules have started sampling in Q1-2015 and will be generally available in Q2-2015.

Acacia Communications Inc.