COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Applied Microcircuits Corp. has insisted throughout the summer that it has seen little slowdown for its 10-Gbit/sec physical-layer chip business. When the ECOC 2008 conference opens in Brussels this week, AMCC will demonstrate the fruits of its sampling efforts.
While some OEMs and module partners have been favoring the new SFP+ format, AMCC has been finding interest in all popular 10G form factors - X2, XFP, and SFP+. Subhash Roy, chief technology officer of AMCC's transport division, said that SFP+ has the broadest growth opportunity due to its common base of support in 8Gbit Fibre Channel and 10G Ethernet, but X2 and XFP have long futures in network interface cards.
At ECOC, AMCC is announcing the use of its Q2025 phy-layer chip in the NetXen NX3-20GxR and NX3-20GCU NICs. These NICs use SFP+ for both optical and direct-attach copper cabling.
MergeOptics GmbH will use the AMCC phy-layer chips in its X2 modules for advanced carrier-based optical transport systems. Mitel-Teleoptix will integrate the AMCC S19233 clocking chip with electronic dispersion compensation in its XFP modules. The Mitel modules use the EDC capabilities in the AMCC clocking chip to extend XFP for long-reach dense wave-division multiplexing applications, in this case to develop modules supporting distances from 2 to 120 km.
Finally, AMCC will demostrate interoperability with Avago Technologies Inc.'s SFP+ modules. Avago has worked with AMCC in the past at integrating the Q2025 chip in the Avago SFP+ modules for 10GBASE-LRM, a standard for long-reach multimode fiber in the data center. While single-mode fiber has been used in both short and long reach applications in the data center, long-reach multimode is still in its early demonstration phase. Roy said the AMCC-Avago demonstrations at ECOC will show OEMs that the technology is ready for deployment.
