OFC 2025 industry reflections - Part 3

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the OFC show in San Francisco. In the penultimate part, the contributions are from Cisco's Bill Gartner, Lumentum's Matt Sysak, Ramya Barna of Mixx Technologies, and Ericsson's Antonio Tartaglia.

San Francisco skyline. Source: Shutterstock

Bill Gartner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Optical Systems and Optics, Cisco  

There was certainly much buzz around co-packaged optics at Nvidia’s GTC event, and that carried over into OFC.

The prevailing thinking seems to be that large-scale co-packaged optics deployment is years away. While co-packaged optics has many benefits, there are challenges that need to be overcome before that happens.

Existing solutions, such as linear pluggable optics (LPO), continue to be discussed as interim solutions that could achieve close to the power savings of co-packaged optics and preserve a multi-vendor pluggable market. That development in the industry will be an intermediate solution before co-packaged optics is required.

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The future of optical I/O is more parallel links

Chris Cole has a lofty vantage point regarding how optical interfaces will likely evolve.

As well as being an adviser to the firm II-VI, Cole is Chair of the Continuous Wave-Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CW-WDM) multi-source agreement (MSA). 

Chris Cole

The CW-WDM MSA recently published its first specification document defining the wavelength grids for emerging applications that require eight, 16 or even 32 optical channels.

And if that wasn’t enough, Cole is also the Co-Chair of the OSFP MSA, which will standardise the OSFP-XD (XD standing for extra dense) 1.6-terabit pluggable form factor that will initially use 16, 100 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) electrical lanes. And when 200Gbps electrical input-output (I/O) technology is developed, OSFP-XD will become a 3.2-terabit module. 

Directly interfacing with 100Gbps ASIC serialiser/ deserialiser (serdes) lanes means the 1.6-terabit module can support 51.2-terabit single rack unit (1RU) Ethernet switches without needing 200Gbps ASIC serdes required by eight-lane modules like the OSFP.

“You might argue that it [the OSFP-XD] is just postponing what the CW-WDM MSA is doing,” says Cole. “But I’d argue the opposite: if you fundamentally want to solve problems, you have to go parallel.”

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CW-WDM MSA charts a parallel path for optics

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have become an integral part of the businesses of the webscale players.

The mega data centre players apply machine learning to the treasure trove of data collected from users to improve services and target advertising.

They can also use their data centres to offer cloud-based AI services.

Training neural networks with data sets is so intensive that it is driving new processor and networking requirements.

It is also impacting optics. Optical interfaces will need to become faster to cope with the amount of data, and that means interfaces with more parallel channels.

Anticipating these trends, a group of companies has formed the Continuous-Wave Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CW-WDM) multi-source agreement (MSA).

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