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Centera Photonics, a leading silicon photonics optical solution provider, has announced the selection of  the Telluride PAM4 DSP (MxL93516) solution by MaxLinear - a provider of RF, analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, for Centera's next generation 100G-DR1 optical modules.

Centera’s proprietary silicon optical engine sets a new frontier for next-generation (400GbE and above) optical interconnects in datacenter applications. The Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) optical engine platform features a small form factor and supreme signal integrity. It utilizes a high-precision semiconductor process that enables superb thermal management capabilities and ensures high reliability. The optical-electrical (OE) platform is designed to support the next generation I/O requirements of super high-performance silicon photonic ICs (PICs). Centera’s Telluride-based PAM4 100G optical interconnects are expected to be commercially available in April.

The MxL93516, MaxLinear’s second-generation Telluride DSP, extends the company’s PAM4 DSP offering by enabling sub-3.5W QSFP28 and SFP-DD 100G optical modules. Like the first-generation Telluride DSPs, the new device offers a monolithically integrated EA-EML laser driver that significantly reduces the overall optical module BOM cost. The MxL93516 allows companies like Centera to develop a 100Gbps optical interconnect module in a compact form factor for intra-datacenter applications with a transmission distance up to 2 kilometers.

Technical Details

The MxL93516 is part of MaxLinear’s second-generation Telluride family of low-power, high-performance PAM4 DSP SoCs. The industry-leading family consists of the MxL93515 and MxL93516. The MxL93516 100G PAM4 DSP integrates an EA-EML driver with 1.8V PP SE swing. The MxL93515 offers a differential 800mV peak-to-peak swing for non-EA-EML-based optics. These PAM4 DSPs enable 100Gbps QSFP28 optical modules using a 4*25G NRZ host interface to 1*100G PAM4 optical interface and SFP-DD optical modules using 2*50G PAM4 host interface to 1*100G PAM4 optical interface.

MaxLinear has engineered a very high-performance DSP engine in both transmit and receive data paths. The resulting superior link-margin enables single-lane 100Gbps optical wavelength technology by mitigating many of the limitations of mass production optical components.

The MxL93515 and MxL93516 feature a comprehensive digital pre-distortion (DPD) engine in the transmit direction to compensate for laser non-linearity and to cancel packaging limitations that cause reflections and bandwidth degradation at these extremely high signal frequencies. On the receive path, the DSP includes an auto-adaptive signal enhancement engine, which integrates a continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE), automatic gain control (AGC), a feed-forward equalizer (FFE), and a decision feedback equalizer (DFE).