Inphi Announces Commercial Availability and Production Ramp for ColorZ(TM)

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 20, 2017) -  Inphi Corporation (NYSE: IPHI), a leading provider of high-speed data movement interconnects, today announced the commercial availability and production ramp of "ColorZ," the industry's first Silicon Photonics 100G PAM4 platform solution for 80km DWDM Data Center Interconnect (DCI) in QSFP28 form factor. Announced a year ago at OFC 2016, ColorZ utilizes advanced Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM4) signaling and delivers up to 4Tb/s of bandwidth over a single fiber, allowing multiple data centers located up to 80km of each other to be connected and act like a single data center.

According to ACG Research, the worldwide optical infrastructure market is predicted to grow from $13.3 billion in 2015 to $17.9 billion by 2020. Purchases of optical DCI equipment are expected to grow from $1.03 billion in 2015 to $4.15 billion in 2020. The demand for speed and bandwidth between data centers, driven by streaming video, social networking, clouding computing and mobile commerce, is motivating mega-cloud data center operators to deploy high-density, low latency and low power DWDM links to connect multiple data centers within a distance of 80km of each other.

"The ability to provide high bandwidth connectivity in a small, cost effective form factor expands metro DCI options for the benefit of geo-distributed applications and workloads," said Timothy Doiron, principal analyst, Intelligent Networking practice at ACG. "In a recent study, we concluded that ColorZ lowered DCI total cost of ownership by up to 67% while also reducing rack space and power consumption."

"The current gap in the inter-data center interconnects is at the sub 80km segment, which is being supported by either lower speed 10G or higher power 100G metro solutions. ColorZ is the lowest power and most cost effective solution for DCI up to 80km," said Dr. Loi Nguyen, founder, senior vice president, Optical Interconnect at Inphi. "This is an important step in realizing our vision of 'The Cloud is the Network™'. The commercial availability and production ramp of ColorZ demonstrate Inphi's industry leadership, as we continue to create solutions that dramatically increase the speed of data movement while keeping the power and cost low."