OFC 2025: industry reflections
Friday, May 2, 2025 at 5:10PM Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary OFC show in San Francisco. Here are the first contributions from Huawei’s Maxim Kuschnerov, NLM Photonics' Brad Booth, LightCounting’s Vladimir Kozlov, and Jürgen Hatheier, Chief Technology Officer, International, at Ciena.
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Maxim Kuschnerov, Director of R&D, Huawei
The excitement of last year's Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics processing unit (GPU) announcement has worn off, and there was a slight hangover at OFC from the market frenzy then.
The 224 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) opto-electronic signalling is reaching mainstream in the data centre. The last remaining question is how far VCSELs will go—30 m or perhaps even further. The clear focus of classical Ethernet data centre optics for scale-out architectures is on the step to 448Gbps-per-lane signalling, and it was great to see many feasibility demonstrations of optical signalling showing that PAM-4 and PAM-6 modulation schemes will be doable.
