Inphi announced the commercial availability and production ramp of its COLORZ II 400ZR QSFP-DD pluggable coherent transceivers for cloud data center interconnects (DCIs). Inphi also confirmed that a longer reach variant, COLORZ II 400G ZR+, which extends the reach of COLORZ II from 120km to about 400km, is in final stages of qualification and expected to be commercially available starting next month.
COLORZ II 400ZR and 400ZR+ enable a dramatic increase in switch rack capacity while reducing power consumption by up to 80%. COLORZ II delivers up to 14.4Tb of capacity per rack unit, compared to 2.4Tb or 3.6Tb per RU for competing solutions, representing a 4-6x increase in throughput per chassis. COLORZ II ZR and ZR+ achieve drastically improved density through higher levels of silicon photonics integration as well as much lower power consumption across all coherent transceiver elements.
“COLORZ II 400G ZR and ZR+ are the enabling technology for next-gen data center interconnects,” said Josef Berger, AVP, Product Marketing, Optical Interconnect at Inphi. “This is an important step in realizing our vision of ‘The Cloud is the Network™’. The commercial availability and production ramp of COLORZ II 400G ZR and ZR+ demonstrates Inphi’s industry leadership as we continue to create solutions that dramatically increase the speed of data movement, while keeping the power and cost low.”
According to market research firm Cignal AI, shipments of 400G ZR and ZR+ modules will expand at a >100% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and provide one-third of worldwide WDM connectivity in 2025.
“The commercial availability of COLORZ II 400ZR makes IP over DWDM viable for network operators,” said Andrew Schmitt, Directing Analyst. “This enables an entirely new type of distributed data center architecture for the cloud and is the first step towards broad adoption in both cloud and traditional service provider networks.”
Inphi said its COLORZ II represents the culmination of several important industry firsts:
- First 400G single-chip, coherent silicon PIC to include all transmit and receive functions
- First low-cost, passive alignment of fiber to the PIC using traditional optics, eliminating the need for complex active alignment
- First low-power, high-performance 7nm CMOS-based coherent DSP enabling 400ZR and 400ZR+ extended reach 100/200/300/400G modes
- First integrated, industry-standard firmware management interface enabling full performance monitoring of DCI or transport systems without direct optical module support
OIF published the Implementation Agreement (IA) for a low-cost, 400ZR coherent optical interface. OIF launched the 400ZR project in response to requests from large-scale data center operators and their suppliers for an interoperable coherent interface that transports 400 Gigabit Ethernet over longer distances. Traditional network operators also became interested in 400ZR for their metro needs. Based on their different requirements, OIF developed…
