Gary Lerude, MWJ Technical Editor
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Gary Lerude is the Technical Editor of Microwave Journal. Previously, he spent his career as a “midwife” aiding the growth of the compound semiconductor industry, from device to application, from defense to commercial. He spent 19 years at Texas Instruments, 11 years at MACOM and six years with TriQuint. Gary holds a bachelor’s in EE, a master’s in systems engineering and an engineers degree (ABD) in EE.

Weekly Report

For the week ending March 27

March 30, 2015

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These news items caught my attention last week.

OFC

The Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference was held in LA. As expected, many companies made product announcements. Here are a few of them:

Acacia announced the first 400 Gbps coherent transceiver module, in the industry standard 5x7 form factor. The AC-400 handles DP-QPSK, 8- and 16-QAM modulation.

Inphi introduced a 45 GBaud quad linear modulator driver. The differential-to-single-ended device is designed to drive high performance Mach-Zehnder modulators.

MACOM announced a linear driver for externally modulated lasers (EML). The MAOM-003115 driver has demonstrated 4 x 100 Gbps over 2 km of single-mode fiber.

MACOM supported Kaiam's 400G demo of the industry's first 16 x 25G. Kaiam used MACOM's quad DML (directly modulated laser) driver (MAOM-002304) and CDR (clock and data recovery) circuit (M37049).

Qorvo announced three drivers and two TIAs for 100, 200 and 400G optical networks using DP-QPSK or 16-QAM modulation. The devices support both CFPx and QFSP28 packaging profiles.

To provide the performance required for their ≥100G modulator drivers, Qorvo developed a 90 nm pHEMT process that runs in their Richardson, Texas fab.

Companies and Technology

Former Hittite CEO Steve Daly joined MACOM’s board.

Custom MMIC introduced a packaged 6 to 14 GHz mixer with 6.5 dB conversion loss, 45 dB LO to IF isolation, and 18 dBm IP3.

Stanford researchers have proposed a process to reduce the cost of GaAs solar cells and MMICs by reusing the underlying wafers.

Markets and Applications

As expected, the broadband industry is challenging the FCC's new net neutrality rules.

Amazon's Prime Air may get off the ground, as the FAA granted Amazon an experimental certificate to test drones over rural Washington.

DARPA is seeking new and novel computer architectures that will accelerate system simulations. You'll find the RFI here.

Verizon is upgrading their U.S. metro network to 100G, tapping Ciena and Cisco for the networking equipment. They expect live traffic flow in 2016.

The rise of catalog networking ICs is enabling new entrants to compete with vertically integrated networking equipment manufacturers like Cisco and Juniper.

Careers

Several organizations are sponsoring a contest to create the next female hero, one who will inspire young women to see themselves as engineers. Five winners will receive $5000 each and be paired with a Hollywood TV producer to develop a script. More info at The Next MacGyver.