Acacia’s Coherent Interconnect Module 8 Awarded 5.0 by Lightwave’s Innovation Reviews

By Acacia | Posted on February 8, 2022

Industry’s First Single-Carrier 1.2T Multi-Haul Pluggable Module Receives the Highest Score

2022 Lightwave Award

We can’t think of a better way to start off 2022 than to have our latest product innovation – the Coherent Interconnect Module 8 (CIM 8) – receive the highest score possible from Lightwave’s well-respected Innovation Reviews Program.   Thank you to the esteemed and experienced panel of judges from the optical communications community for recognizing Acacia’s CIM 8 product among the best this year.

Delivering leading capacity and reach with maximum fiber utilization, the CIM 8 is the industry’s first 1.2 terabits per second (1.2T) faceplate pluggable coherent module, highlighting a new 8th generation Coherent Interconnect Module family, powered by Acacia’s Jannu 5nm CMOS digital signal processor (DSP) ASIC.

Jannu Firsts

The CIM 8 solution delivers industry-leading performance with single carrier 1.2T operation, combining the Jannu DSP with our 3D Siliconization packaging technology, which includes the silicon photonics integrated circuit (SiPh PIC), high-speed modulator driver and transimpedance amplifier (TIA) in a single opto-electronic package. The Jannu DSP is designed to offer network operators the ability to maximize transmission data rate across a wide range of network applications including DCI, metro, long-haul and subsea.

“On behalf of the Lightwave Innovation Reviews, I would like to congratulate Acacia on receiving our highest score of 5.0,” said Lightwave Associate Publisher and Editorial Director, Stephen Hardy. “This competitive program enables Lightwave to celebrate and recognize the most innovative products that will bring the most benefit to the optical communications community each year – and our judges indicate that the CIM 8 certainly has the potential to do just that.”

The architecture of the (CIM 8) solution builds upon the success of the Acacia AC1200 Pico DSP based product family and is well-aligned with traffic demands as networks transition to 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). The CIM 8 is designed to enable network operators to double their transmission capacity over even greater reaches. The CIM 8 family can address transmission of multiple 400GbE client interfaces over virtually any transport network application, delivering 1.2T per carrier capacity for high-capacity DCI interfaces and 800 gigabits per second per carrier capacity over most optical links using 4 bits/symbol (~16QAM) modulation.

Continued Coherent Innovation
Acacia has been a pioneer of silicon photonics since 2012 when it was the first coherent module vendor to envision silicon as the platform for the integration of multiple discreet photonic functions while increasing the density and reducing cost of optical interconnect products. Since then, Acacia has been working towards a clear vision of how to cost-effectively scale network capacity.

The Jannu DSP builds on the performance and architectural benefits that have made Acacia’s Pico DSP such a successful coherent solution, having been deployed in more than 100 networks around the globe and by 3 of the 4 largest hyperscalers.

Historically, Acacia has been a groundbreaker in advancing coherent technology, and the company continues to demonstrate a long-term vision for how multi-haul coherent optics should evolve over time.

For more information on the CIM 8 and to learn more about how coherent technology has evolved in response to growing bandwidth demands, refer to this recent article.