Technology

We are all familiar with the relentless growth in digital information and the need to cost-effectively and effortlessly continue to move that information through the world's networks. Fiber optic transmission has and will continue be at center stage in the transmission of information across local, metro, and long-haul networks. While over the last quarter century there have been impressive advances in fiber optic transmission, in many ways optical transmission systems have remained hard to design, hard to install, hard to maintain, and are expensive systems that use rather primitive techniques when compared to their RF and wireless cousins.

We are at the beginning of a tectonic shift in fiber optic transmission sub-systems and Acacia Communications is committed to excel in this new era. In particular, ultra high speed fiber optic transmission at 100 Gbps and beyond will use sophisticated modulation/demodulation techniques powered by coherent optical detection, ultra-fast DACs and ADCs, and massive digital signal processing ASICs that operate on Tb/s of information.

Business Benefits to Our Technology

The use of this advanced technology will increase capacity, increase bandwidth efficiency, enable automatic electronic compensation of linear and non-linear fiber impairments and most importantly, will provide a dramatic cost savings over today's fiber optic transmission technology. For example, the use of electronic compensation of fiber impairments is a game changing advance in optical transmission systems since it replaces bulky and costly optical functions with low cost electronic processing in an ASIC.

Furthermore, digital equalization of polarization mode dispersion (PMD) enables transport of 100G over fiber links that cannot even support 10G today. The powerful digital signal processing (DSP) in Acacia's industry leading solution is made possible by the continuous advances in sub micron CMOS semiconductor technology in combination with Acacia's proprietary and novel DSP algorithms and high-speed optical architectures. These same techniques will be used to push data rates up to 1 tera bit per second.

Acacia's highly differentiated and cost effective 100G solution provides industry leading performance in fiber reach, power consumption and footprint. Fiber transmission distances in excess of 2,000km are made possible by deploying a very powerful and novel Forward Error Correction (FEC) technique. Acacia is first in the industry to incorporate optical transmission solution with Soft Decision-FEC, which alone can increase the fiber reach by 50 to 100%. Acacia will also deliver the industry's first 100G subsystem solution based on the latest CMOS process, namely 40nm.