June 25, 2008 -- Luxtera (www.luxtera.com) reports that its Blazar 40-Gigabit optical active Cable (OAC) is under evaluation by a number of Tier 1 OEMs in the high performance computing (HPC), enterprise, and proprietary interconnect markets.
First introduced in August 2007, the company says the OAC has since been undergoing evaluation by customers, with a number of wins successfully completed to date. The product is suited for InfiniBand and Ethernet applications in HPC clusters and enterprise data centers, and is billed as an optimal interconnect solution for emerging 40G QDR applications.
Luxtera contends that enterprise data centers and HPC users gain 2x throughput and over 3x reach using the Blazar OAC, versus existing multimode fiber based interconnects. User can also gain 4x density improvement with one QSFP connector, taking the same space as four XFP connectors, maintains the company.
Utilizing its proprietary CMOS photonics technology, Luxtera delivers these improvements in the form of a single, optoelectronic silicon CMOS chip. The company says this single chip QSFP solution enables utilization of mainstream, low-cost electronics-like fabrication, assembly and test processes for volume manufacturing of optical transceivers, resulting in lower power, higher reliability and lower cost products than traditional multi-chip VCSEL-based solutions.
"Luxtera is excited about the customer interest in its award-winning OAC. We were the first company to ship 40G OAC for field evaluations with positive results," said Marek Tlalka, vice president of marketing for Luxtera. "Our breakthrough Silicon CMOS photonics technology enables us to deliver the longest reach, highly reliable solution that will enable optical connectivity and price points comparable with legacy copper cabling."
A video demonstration by Luxtera's Marek Tlalka of the company's CMOS photonics technology, including the Blazar OAC, can be found under the OFC 2008 tab at Connector Specifier TV.
