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FIBRE FOR THE LONG HAUL AWARD-WINNING


Board-level optical interconnects worth $5.6B by 2022 says CIR


An entirely new class of standards-compliant optical


boards will provide massive backplane capacity for routers and switches compared to the conventional electrical backplanes and motherboards of today, with the market for such ‘board-level’ optical interconnects growing from $696 million in 2017 to $5.6 billion by 2022. That’s the conclusion of the latest


report from industry analyst CIR titled, ‘Opportunities in Board-Level Optical Interconnects: Optics- Enabled Circuit Boards, Optical Engines and Optical Backplanes’. The huge amount of data flowing


internally in servers, routers and switches can no longer be handled by copper interconnects, the analysts assert. Demand is currently being met by semi-proprietary optical links and optical engines, and some active optical cable (AOC) products. CIR envisages standardised optical boards could emerge as part of a larger trend towards embedded optics. ‘If the industry can arrive at


standards for optical engines, the market can potentially reach $1.2 billion by 2022. The absence of


standards has held back the market, however,’ the firm reported. Optical backplanes have been


used for supercomputing applications for many years. They are finding a new market in routers and switches. By 2022 revenues from optical backplanes will have reached $864 million, say CIR. CIR points out that the current


generation of optical interconnect products are very expensive compared to their electrical equivalents. To cut costs, a large amount of technological development is required, the firm says. Most early products are based on glass or polymer fibre media. Future products will reduce costs and increase interconnect densities by using waveguides, polymer optics and free space optics Taking the optical board concept


mainstream will initially give an advantage to firms dabbling in this space for years. They include IBM, Cisco, Juniper, and Oracle. In the next few years, CIR believes that start-ups will emerge to challenge them with optical boards based on new materials, free-space optics and innovative laser designs.


EXFO acquires Ontology Systems for network automation


Network test and measurement company EXFO has acquired privately held Ontology Systems, a specialist in real-time network topology discovery and service-chain mapping, for a total consideration of $7.6 million (€7.24 million), net of cash. UK-based Ontology Systems


uses graph-data and semantic searches to build real-time views of network services and related network elements. This skill set fits right in with the industry emphasis on network functions


virtualisation (NFV) and software defined networking (SDN) as service providers look to make their communications infrastructures highly agile so they can deploy new services on the fly. An automated network inventory system fully integrated with probing agents can accelerate fault discovery, root-cause analysis and will eventually enable closed-loop automation in hybrid physical- virtual environments, according to EXFO.


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