Failure-Free PICs

Two California makers of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have reported failure-free operation of their products. !%NeoPhotonics Corp.%! of San Jose, a designer and manufacturer of PIC-based modules and subsystems for bandwidth-intensive, high-speed communications networks, announced that its products had accumulated more than 3 billion hours of operation without a reported field failure. !%6691%%Infinera%!, based in Sunnyvale, indicated that its PICs recently surpassed 500 million hours of failure-free operation in live networks worldwide. With the accelerating deployment of 100-Gb/s data transmission, a single 40-channel arrayed waveguide grating deployed several years ago may soon be carrying a few trillion bits of information every second. At those data transmission volumes, a single point of failure in a network could disrupt tens of millions of individual phone calls and other data flows, said Tim Jenks, CEO and chairman of NeoPhotonics.