ACADEMIA

Inphi Corporation announced the industry's first quad linear driver designed for linear transmitters to enable next-generation 100G/400G coherent systems to address the need for higher speed, higher performance networking infrastructure. Inphi's IN3214SZ quad linear driver will be showcased at Inphi's OFC/NFOEC booth #1447 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, March 6-8, 2012.

"Today's 10G, 40G, and 100G networks typically use basic amplitude or phase modulation signaling techniques, but not both, to encode electronic data onto optical signals. In order to achieve higher performance and higher speed, we believe more complex modulation schemes, in which both amplitude and phase are modulated will be necessary. Such complex modulation formats are best implemented with linear transmitters. Inphi's IN3214SZ is the industry's first 32Gbps integrated quad linear driver for linear transmitter architectures and is designed to enable more complex modulation formats to be implemented," said Jag Bolaria, senior analyst at the Linley Group.

End users continue to increase their demands for high-performance and bandwidth as they do more and more on their wired and wireless devices. This in turn puts pressure on network operators to build next-generation networks that deliver ever-increasing capacity. Today, 100G coherent systems achieve four bits per symbol. Inphi's IN3214SZ is designed to enable OEMs to implement more complex modulation with up to 16 bits per symbol. Such an efficient modulation format will allow the optical rate to remain the same but the amount of information to be transmitted to increase by a factor of four. Inphi's IN3214SZ is the industry's first integrated quad linear driver that enables such complex modulation formats to be implemented.

"Inphi is the first company to offer its customers an advanced linear driver that is designed to enable them to build next-generation 100G and 400G communications infrastructure," said Loi Nguyen, vice president networking, Communications and Multi-Market products at Inphi. "The IN3214SZ driver offers high bandwidth, high linearity, and low power consumption, so that future systems can be built to keep pace with the burgeoning demand of users."

Industry's First 100G/400G Quad Linear Driver Sampling today, the IN3214SZ is a differential input, single-ended output, variable gain, linear driver that supports data rates up to 32.5Gbps and has excellent linearity, high bandwidth, and low power dissipation.