Lumentum shows InP advances at OFC
At the recent OFC 2025 exhibition in San Francisco, Lumentum announced a number of advances in its InP photonic chip technologies for delivering higher bandwidth and more power efficiency in next-generation AI data centres.
The InP innovations enable future 400 Gbps-per-lane optical links, more efficient 200 Gbps-per-lane optical links, and co-packaged optics.
“Building on decades of InP expertise, Lumentum is driving industry technology leadership and volume production readiness for the future 400G per lane generation of optical interconnects, along with more efficient 200G per lane optical interconnects, to enable data centre compute capacity scaling,” said Matt Sysak, Lumentum CTO of Cloud and Networking.
“Lumentum InP technology is also enabling new co-packaged optics solutions to significantly reduce power consumption in AI data centre networks, supporting larger AI installations and accelerating the transition from copper to photonic interconnects.”
For example, Lumentum demonstrated two key 400 Gbps-per-lane photonic technologies which will enable the 3.2T generation of optical transceivers at OFC 2025.
These included a 448 Gbps data transmission using a 224 GBaud PAM4 externally modulated laser (EML) technology in collaboration with Keysight Technologies and NTT Innovative Devices. And a 450 Gbps PAM4 distributed feedback (DFB) laser with an integrated Mach-Zehnder (MZI) modulator for 400 Gbps-per-lane technologies.
To address power challenges in bandwidth scaling, Lumentum engineers presented a technical paper at OFC 2025 detailing results from Lumentum’s new 200 Gbps-per-lane differential drive electro-absorption modulated laser (DD EML). These lasers operate at a lower drive voltage, reducing power dissipation while offering excellent signal integrity and cross-talk immunity.
Lumentum also highlighted its ultra-high power (UHP) 1310 nm DFB lasers designed for co-packaged optics (CPO) to support higher-density optical interconnects. The UHP platform is based on InP pump lasers for Raman amplification applications.
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