In October 2020, Lumenisity Ltd. made its first public product announcement, having reached a milestone by pioneering its deployable NANF-based hollow-core fiber-optic cable products, the hollow-core TradeSmart and CoreSmart lines, with 10Gb/s, 40 channel DWDM transmission over 10 km links. This week at OFC 2021, Lumenisity introduced the next generation of its CoreSmart cable, offering high bandwidth and longer reach for data center interconnects (DCIs), including edge and 5G xHaul applications.
Lumenisity develops and manufactures advanced cable products to address the need for high-speed transactions and bandwidth increases in advanced communications systems. The company notes that trials were recently held by BT with ZR pluggable modules and Lumenisity’s new generation of field deployable CoreSmart hollow-core cable.
As reported by Lumenisity:
The trials proved to be very successful with results showing the first demonstration of error-free DWDM transmission at 400Gb/s with 38 channel loading over the C band including 3x 400Gb/s probe channels using 400ZR QSFP-DD transceivers, through 10km hollow-core NANF cable.
These results are thought to be the first of this kind reported; more detail on these trials can be found in the accepted OFC paper, First Demonstration of 400ZR DWDM Transmission through Field Deployable Hollow-Core fiber Cable.
The aforementioned paper also highlights the improved nonlinear performance benefits of transmission through hollow-core NANF cable compared with single-mode fiber, "emphasizing the huge potential of future low-loss hollow-core fiber in high-speed, ZR pluggable modules in DCI networks, due to improved SNR resulting from low nonlinearity and reduced load on the digital signal processing from lower accumulated dispersion," according to Lumenisity.
Lumenisity notes its CoreSmart NANF cable is robustly single-moded, which provides continuous uninterrupted simultaneous single mode transmission at 1310 nm, as well as over the full C and L bands and beyond. The hollow-core cable used in this trial passed strict environmental testing over temperatures ranging from -30 deg C to +70 deg C.
The company says advancements made in this new generation cable also unlock the door to longer haul 10Gb/s DWDM transmission for HFT [high-frequency trading] far beyond the 10 km previously announced.
Tony Pearson, business development director at Lumenisity, said, “With our latest generation of cable solution, we’re continuing to unlock the huge potential of the NANF hollow-core fiber design, coupled with our field deployment solutions. These build on our extensive field experience in HFT with a number of DCI deployments expected in the near future."
Mike Fake, Director of Product Management at Lumenisity added, “Along with the link extension between 5G wireless towers and base units, this generation delivers a significant new capability to the high bandwidth DCI route deployment toolbox, with route extension up to 1.5x and geographic site selection expansion by 2.25x within existing latency envelope design rules. We are delighted to be able to demonstrate this capability in Terabit applications."
Lumenisity, NANF, hollow-core TradeSmart and CoreSmart are registered trademarks of Lumenisity Limited. For more information, visit www.lumenisity.com.