Failure-Free PICs
Two California makers of photonic integrated
circuits (PICs) have reported failure-free operation of their products. NeoPhotonics
Corp. of San Jose, a designer and manufacturer of PIC-based modules and subsystems
for bandwidth-intensive, high-speed communications networks, announced that its
products had accumulated more than 3 billion hours of operation without a reported
field failure. Infinera, based in Sunnyvale, indicated that its PICs recently surpassed
500 million hours of failure-free operation in live networks worldwide. With the
accelerating deployment of 100-Gb/s data transmission, a single 40-channel arrayed
waveguide grating deployed several years ago may soon be carrying a few trillion
bits of information every second. At those data transmission volumes, a single point
of failure in a network could disrupt tens of millions of individual phone calls
and other data flows, said Tim Jenks, CEO and chairman of NeoPhotonics.
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