Cisco pushes silicon photonics for enterprise, webscale networking

When Cisco announced the deal in December, Rob Salvagno, Cisco's vice president of Corporate Business Development, said, "As system port capacity increases from 100GbE to 400GbE and beyond, optics plays an increasingly important role in addressing network infrastructure constraints, particularly density and power requirements."

The combination of Cisco's and Luxtera's capabilities in 100GbE/400GbE optics, silicon and process technology will enable customers to build future-proof networks optimized for performance, reliability and cost, Salvago stated.

"As we move from 400G to terabit speeds, it gets challenging to get all that capacity off a line card or ASIC, and you're going to need a different optics architecture to handle speeds like that. That's where we expect technology from Luxtera to come into play," Gartner said. "Optics is important in how we advance the capacity, etc., of routers and switches and how silicon ...