Frequently Asked Questions

Acacia is an adjacent brand to Cisco. Cisco acquired Acacia in 2021 and the Acacia brand continues to market and sell to network equipment manufacturers including Cisco. Cisco is fully committed to supporting the ongoing development, supply and support of Acacia’s existing and future products, as well as the continuing and expanding of Acacia’s customer base, which includes supporting Cisco’s transformative network strategies.

Acacia was founded in June 2009 by Mehrdad Givehchi, Benny Mikkelsen, and Christian Rasmussen.

3D siliconization is an Acacia innovation. This integration and packaging approach utilizes highly scalable and reliable volume electronics manufacturing processes that apply integration and 3D stacking packaging techniques to enable a single device to include all the high speed opto-electronic functions necessary for coherent transceivers.

3D Siliconization not only decreases footprint by including into a single device the DSP, PIC, drivers, and TIAs, but it also results in improved signal integrity and performance because the high-speed RF interfaces are tightly coupled together, resulting in the reduction of electrical interconnects. This is critical for high baud rate operation. The device is manufactured using standard CMOS packaging processes that leverage the same reliability, cost, and volume scaling advantages.

Coherent optics refers to the use of light waves that are in phase with each other to transmit data. This approach allows data to be robustly sent at the speed of light over fiber optic cables. Coherent transmission uses amplitude, phase, and polarization properties of light to convert data into 0s and 1s before it is sent and then converted back at the other end of the cable where it is then delivered to its intended location.

Silicon photonics uses silicon as an optical medium and leverages CMOS fabrication processing technology. This approach allows tighter monolithic integration of many optical functions within a single device. While traditional optics systems used many discrete pieces, silicon photonics allows all those pieces to fit onto a single silicon chip. This tight integration is what has allowed component vendors to continually drive reductions in the cost and size of optical solutions. For network equipment manufacturer customers, using the silicon photonics chip means they can design more ports per linecard, increasing the capacity of their system.

Acacia was a pioneer of silicon photonics in 2012 when it was the first coherent module vendor to envision silicon as the platform for the integration of multiple discreet photonic functions while increasing the density and reducing cost of optical interconnect products.

Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable Double Density (QSFP-DD) is a multi-source agreement (MSA) form factor for a module that fits into high-density switch and router client ports for optical interconnect links.

Acacia’s portfolio of QSFP-DD modules includes 400G, 400ZR, 400ZR+, 400G OpenZR+, 400G ULH, 800ZR, and 800G ZR+ modules. These products support DCI edge, metro/regional, long haul and ultra long haul networks, submarine, as well as service provider access network applications.

Octal Small Form-factor Pluggable (OSFP) solutions fit into high-density switch and router client ports for optical interconnect links.

The Coherent Interconnect Module 8 (CIM 8) was the first pluggable coherent module on the market that broke through the terabit threshold, providing 1.2T transmission over a single wavelength. It was also the first >1T coherent pluggable module that provides operational advantages over embedded designs. Many providers have announced successful trials using the CIM 8, including Microsoft, Verizon, Windstream Wholesale, AARNet and Nysernet. Customers use CIM 8 in a variety of applications such as long-haul, submarine, and multi-ROADM metro.

Acacia’s customers are network equipment manufacturers, network operators, telecom carriers, hyperscalers, service providers, cloud providers and other companies in the telecommunications industry.

AI is driving coherent transport growth, especially for scale-across applications, and this should continue in the future as coherent modules enable network operators to support higher coherent transmission baud rates and higher-capacity coherent links for shorter reaches.

Acacia’s coherent modules are already being deployed in today’s AI build outs and customers are projecting increasing bandwidth requirements in the future which will be addressed with next-generation modules such as 800ZR/ZR+ and 1.6T MSA pluggables. In addition, its expanded line of client optics components deliver the higher-bandwidth, lower power and smaller footprint required for even the most demanding AI workloads.

High-bandwidth applications such as AI, cloud computing and machine learning are driving the need for higher capacity links to deliver more internet bandwidth.

Acacia believes in open networking and is proud to be actively involved in driving standards and multi-vendor interoperability collaborations that support rapid time to market and economies of scale. For example, Acacia has made significant contributions to multiple OIF implementation agreement efforts and other industry standards including co-authoring OIF 400ZR project start and editor, actively driving 800ZR and 800G ZR+, co-authoring OIF 1600ZR project start, and was an OpenZR+ MSA founder member and co-chair. Acacia is also an active member in OIF, IEEE, OpenROADM, and OpenZR+.

Scale up refers to scaling within a rack, while scale out extends outside of the rack and throughout the data center. And when that’s not enough to handle the AI workloads, providers look to scale across multiple data centers so that resources such as GPU power can be distributed across multiple geographic locations.

Pluggable coherent optics are critical components in scale-across networks because they reduce power consumption by eliminating unnecessary client interfaces and allowing direct router-to-router connectivity.  The evolution from early ZR modules for metro DCI (~120km) to ZR+ (~1000km) and ultra-long haul (3000+ km) now provides flexible, scalable solutions for both intra- and inter-data center links.

800G ZR/ZR+ pluggable modules are well positioned to be the workhorse in scale-across networks, with performance-optimized 1.2T modules such as Acacia’s CIM 8 also being deployed, followed by 1600ZR/ZR+ coherent modules in the future.

With AI driving unprecedented demands on networking infrastructure, optical interconnect components such as PAM4 DSPs have become critical for delivering the intra-data center bandwidth needed for operators to quickly scale-out their networks with reliable, low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity. 

Designed to enable 200G per lane PAM4 data transmission for 1.6T optical transceivers, Acacia’s Kibo DSP delivers 20% lower power compared to existing 1.6T module implementations designed to meet the highly reliable connectivity requirements of AI networks. The Kibo PAM4 DSP in conjunction with Acacia’s Optical Engines can deliver a solution with the performance and power efficiency required for the most demanding AI workloads. 

In the past, advances in coherent technology increased efficiency by doubling the baud rate while maintaining the same modulation format. However, we are now at the point where doubling from 400ZR+ to 800G ZR+ increases wavelength capacity but not C-band capacity.  As a result, we are now seeing L-band being deployed alongside C-band from day 1 – and, in some cases, at comparable volumes.

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Acacia employees are employed by Cisco. Learn more here.