| The data center industry has seen massive growth around the world. Emerging applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud computing are driving the rapid growth of network bandwidth in data centers, expanding the scale of networks, and flattening network architectures. This has created higher requirements on the density and power consumption of switch ports.
The high-speed development of ultra-broadband optical interconnections between data centers also increases unit capacity costs, bandwidth density, and the energy efficiency of switches and optical modules. Since 2010, the capacity of ASIC and optical modules has increased by 40 times, with the ASIC capacity going from 0.64 Tbit/s to 25.6 Tbit/s and the optical module capacity going from 10 Gbit/s to 400 Gbit/s.
However, as Moore’s Law slows down, the evolution of chip processors approaches a physical bottleneck. Electrical signals face greater challenges in signal integrity. SerDes power consumption is increasing, as is the power consumption of the entire link, which tends to exceed the power consumption of the switching chip. Reducing power consumption while also optimizing the heat dissipation of optical modules in high-density systems through innovative system architectures has become a hot research topic in the photoelectron field.
In the post-Moore era, how can we cope with the increasingly strict requirements on the power consumption of optical modules in data centers?
The industry has witnessed both new technical solutions of pluggable optics and popular co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions, in which the switch ASIC and optical engine are integrated and co-packaged by advanced integrated packaging technologies. No matter which technical path is used, reducing system power consumption is a challenge to achieving continuous breakthroughs in development and evolution.
The high-speed optical interconnection solution for data centers has ushered in the 112G SerDes era. Both pluggable optics and CPO use an ODSP-based system architecture, which is a major contributor to the overall power consumption of optical modules. The industry is considering introducing the linear drive technology between the ASIC and the transceiver so that the EQ capability of the SerDes in the ASIC can be used to reduce power consumption. As a topic that has attracted wide attention in the industry, linear drive technology is also considered to provide a balance when it comes to reducing power consumption, cost, and implementing complexity of high-speed ports.
Will linear drive technology be an effective method for reducing system power consumption?
Linear drive technology removes the DSP chip to construct a pluggable or CPO analog interface solution, which can effectively reduce system power consumption. However, this technology also faces challenges, such as in analog interface reliability, performance deterioration due to interface crosstalk, and manufacturing, as well as higher requirements on link balancing and in the driving capabilities of the main chip. Therefore, the application and deployment of this technology need to be discussed, verified, and developed by the entire the optoelectronic industry.
On March 21, 2023, IPEC and LightCounting will hold a global webinar titled „Linear Drive Enables Green All-Optical Connectivity for Data Centers.“ Experts from Meta, Huawei, NVIDIA, Ranovus, MACOM, Source Photonics, and Nubis Communications will be invited to share their views and discuss the key technical challenges of linear drive technology, whether it will meet market demands, and its future application scenarios.
(1) In which scenarios will optical system solutions using linear drive technology most likely be first applied?
(2) Does the linear pluggable solution differ from the CPO solution in terms of application scenarios? Will the linear pluggable optics solution affect CPO application progress?
(3) Are there any prerequisites for applying linear drive technology to pluggable optics and CPO solutions? What are the key features? What is the current research progress?
(4) Unlike the linear CPO integrated solution, the linear pluggable solution requires a series of analog interface standardization work. Due to tight optical-electrical coupling in its overall link performance, does the linear pluggable solution need more technical collaboration to ensure the construction of an open ecosystem that can be interconnected? What are the challenges in its future evolution?
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