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Compass EOS, an Isreali-based chip company has developed the world’s first commercial chip-to-chip direct silicon-to-photonics based router that is capable of delivering terabits of bandwidth at a fraction of the size and power of existing solutions.
The router, which is the first in a family of next-generation, core-grade modular routers, is designed to increase network capacity and speed, and it is powered by icPhotonics, a technology developed by the company.
Vice President, Sales for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Compass EOS, Mr. John Asher, who was in Nigeria to introduce the product to service providers and to customers that are involved in the use of bandwidth, said the technology integrates optical and electronic components into a single microchip.
According to him, the innovation represents a cross-disciplinary achievement which has been pursued by industry giants for years without success.
“Compass-EOS’ icPhotonics optical interconnect fundamentally changes the way routers are built, as it comes in a more compact box, with larger bandwidth capacity that simplifies the deployment, operation, and scaling of service provider networks. It comes with several r10004 chips and each r10004 can serve as a modular router building block for the deployment of scale-out routing, enabling software-defined networking (SDN) and other approaches such as network function virtualisation (NFV),” Asher said.
He added that Compass-EOS has deployed r10004 routers at customer locations around the world, which include a Japan-based voice, internet and cable provider that uses the routers at the termination points of its transpacific high capacity network, providing a vital link between North America and APAC; and a US-based media and technology company that has deployed the r10004 for high-bandwidth connectivity.
Speaking on the benefits of the product, Asher listed such benefits to include: High capacity at dramatically lower footprint and power consumption; Pay-as-you-grow scalability; Guaranteed service quality (QoS) at high utilisation rates; Maximum router protection from attacks at maximum capacity; Designed for SDN from day one, enabling network virtualisation; and Unmatched levels of congestion-free multicast traffic.
According to him, the Compass EOS routers would help boost bandwidth capacity, especially in a country like Nigeria where most of the bandwidth capacities are lying untapped at the shores of the country.
“The router is three times smaller than comparable core routers and supports a mix of 100GbE and 10GbE ports. The carrier-grade r10004 router has been shipping since late 2012 and is available globally. Compass-EOS radically changes network routing by shifting it into the age of silicon photonics, which is a new breed of scale-out routers, enabling SDN-based, simplified architectures in service provider networks,” he said.
Asher explained that although the world runs on data, but that today’s high speed carrier grade routers are costly with high power consumption level and extremely complex to scale. He added that their footprint and power requirements impose great costs on service providers.
According to him, when Compass-EOS set out to create a high bandwidth router that could scale out easily it soon became evident that the challenge could only be met by developing a novel electro-optical technology that would enable chip to chip and chip to board interconnection and the solution could not be purely by incremental development.
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