“Burn me once, shame on you; burn me twice, shame on me” appears to be the new credo at Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN).
After being burned when Cisco acquired optical component maker CoreOptics in May 2010, giving Cisco a secure supply of 40G optical modules and leaving NSN with a competitor as a crucial supplier, NSN has taken an aggressive strategy to protect itself by making investments in its supply chain to ensure access to key emerging technologies.
Since the beginning of 2011, the company has made strategic investments in three key component suppliers: Texas Instruments (TI), Skorpios Technologies, and most recently ClariPhy Communications. Each investment involves a different part of the business, but they all have one thing in common: DSP (digital signal processing).
Nokia Siemens and TI unveiled their relationship at Mobile World Congress in February 2011 coincident with the launch of NSN’s Liquid Radio, which uses TI’s wireless base station system-on-chip (SoC) and DSP technology.
Then, in March, NSN announced that it had entered into a strategic development agreement with Skorpios Technologies. Skorpios manufactures integrated opto-electronic modules and subsystems for optical equipment. NSN is using Skorpios’s coherent technology for extended-reach PON applications in its next-generation optical access (NGOA) program.
Most recently, in June 2011 Nokia Siemens announced that it was an investor in start-up transceiver and subsystem vendor ClariPhy’s latest funding round. ClariPhy is a maker of ultra-high-speed mixed-signal processing ICs for optical networks.
The company is developing SoC technology for coherent optical transmission at data rates of 40 gigabits per second (40G), 100G, and beyond. Nokia Siemens is ClariPhy’s largest investor.