The industry's highest-performance coherent optical engine, Infinera’s 1.6T ICE6, gets a turbo charge

San Jose, Calif. – Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) announced today the introduction of ICE6 Turbo, the industry’s first coherent optical solution that can operate above 100 Gbaud. Produced in Infinera’s in-house, U.S.-based fabrication center, ICE6 Turbo is a performance-optimized configuration of Infinera’s industry-leading 1.6T (2 x 800G) ICE6 coherent optical engine. With the introduction of the Turbo mode, ICE6 increases its lead over competitive solutions by providing up to a 30 percent performance boost in high-speed applications. The result is the industry’s first solution that enables network operators to support 4 x 400 GbE services using a single optical engine across long-haul distances and 3 x 400 GbE services across ultra-long-haul distances, driving down the cost per bit of delivering high-speed optical services.

400 GbE services are rapidly becoming the most important service offering for many network operators. By supporting more 400 GbE services in a single optical engine across longer distances than any other solution on the market, ICE6 Turbo can provide significant economic benefits to network operators. ICE6 Turbo builds on the industry-leading performance of Infinera’s ICE6 optical engine, widely deployed by leading network operators globally and recognized for setting industry records for network performance.

Infinera’s ICE6 Turbo solution leverages the capabilities of the company’s unique monolithic indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology. The new benchmark for optical performance set by ICE6 Turbo is enabled by the holistic co-design of the various optical engine components and pioneering optical networking features including second-generation Nyquist subcarriers, long-codeword probabilistic constellation shaping (LC-PCS), dynamic bandwidth allocation, and soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC) gain sharing.

“ICE6 Turbo builds on Infinera’s heritage of delivering innovative optical solutions that provide meaningful value for our customers,” said Ron Johnson, General Manager of Infinera’s Optical Systems & Network Solutions Group. “ICE6 Turbo further pushes the boundaries of optical performance, enabling our customers to rapidly scale their networks with industry-leading economics.”

As with currently available ICE6 solutions, ICE6 Turbo will be available in both C- and L-band variants and will be showcased at OFC 2022 in San Diego. ICE6 Turbo functionality will be generally available in the early fourth quarter of 2022.