The OIF's coherent optics work gets a ZR+ rating
The OIF has started work on a 1600ZR+ standard to enable the sending of 1.6 terabits of data across hundreds of kilometres of optical fibre.The initiative follows the OIF's announcement last September that it had kicked off 1600ZR. ZR refers to an extended reach standard, sending 1.6 terabits over an 80-120km point-to-point link.
600ZR follows the OIF’s previous work standardising the 400-gigabit 400ZR and the 800-gigabit 800ZR coherent pluggable optics.
The decision to address a ‘ZR+’ standard is a first for the OIF. Until now, only the OpenZR+ Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) and the OpenROADM MSA developed interoperable ZR+ optics.
The OIF’s members’ decision to back the 1600ZR+ coherent modem work was straightforward, says Karl Gass, optical vice chair of the OIF’s physical link layer (PLL) working group. Several companies wanted it, and there was sufficient backing. “One hyperscaler in particular said: ‘We really need that solution’,” says Gass.
OIF, OpenZR+, and OpenROADM
Developing a 1600ZR+ standard will interest telecom operators who, like with 400ZR and the advent of 800ZR, can take advantage of large volumes of coherent pluggables driven by hyperscaler demand. However, Gass says no telecom operator is participating in the OIF 1600ZR+ work.
“It appears that they are happy with whatever the result [of the ZR+ work] will be,” says Gass. Telecom operators are active in the OpenROADM MSA.
Now that the OIF has joined OpenZR+ and the OpenROADM MSA in developing ZR+ designs, opinions differ on whether the industry needs all three.
“There is significant overlap between the membership of the OpenZR+ MSA and the OIF, and the two groups have always maintained positive collaboration,” says Tom Williams, director of technical marketing at Acacia, a leading member of the OpenZR+. “We view the adoption of 1600ZR+ in the OIF as a reinforcement of the value that the OpenZR+ has brought to the market.”
Robert Maher, Infinera’s CTO, believes the industry does not need three standards. However, having three organisations does provide different perspectives and considerations.
Meanwhile, Maxim Kuschnerov, director R&D at Huawei, says the OIF’s decision to tackle ZR+ changes things.”OpenZR+ kickstarted the additional use cases in the industry, and OpenROADM took it away but going forward, it doesn’t seem that we need additional MSAs if the OIF is covering ZR+ for Ethernet clients in ROADM networks,” says Kuschnerov. “Only the OTN [framing] modes need to be covered, and the ITU-T can do that.”
Kuschnerov also would like more end-user involvement in the OIF group. “It would help shape the evolving use cases and not be guided by a single cloud operator,” he says.
ZR history
The OIF is a 25-year-old industry organisation with over 150 members, including hyperscalers, telecom operators, systems and test equipment vendors, and component companies.
In October 2016, the OIF started the 400ZR project, the first pluggable 400-gigabit Ethernet coherent optics specification. The principal backers of the 400ZR work were Google and Microsoft. The standard was designed to link equipment in data centres up to 120km apart.
The OIF 400ZR specification also included an un-amplified version with a reach of several tens of kilometres. The first 400ZR specification document, which the OIF calls an Implementation Agreement, was completed in March 2020 (see chart above).
The OIF started the follow-up on the 800ZR specification in November 2020, a development promoted by Google. Gass says the OIF is nearing completion of the 800ZR Implementation Agreement document, expected in the second half of 2024.
If the 1600ZR and ZR+ coherent work projects take a similar duration, the first 1600ZR and 1600ZR+ products will appear in 2027.
Symbol rate and other challenges
Moving to a 1.6-terabit coherent pluggable module using the same modulation scheme – 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation or 16-QAM – used for 400ZR and 800ZR suggests a symbol rate of 240 gigabaud (GBd).
“That is the maths, but there might be concerns with technical feasibility,” says Gass. “That’s not to say it won’t come together.”
The highest symbol rate coherent modem to date is Ciena’s WaveLogic 6e, which was announced a year ago. The design uses a 3nm CMOS coherent digital signal processor (DSP) and a 200GBd symbol rate. It is also an embedded coherent design, not one required to fit inside a pluggable optical module with a constrained power consumption.
Kuschnerov points out that the baud rates of ZR and ZR+ have differed. And this will likely continue. 800ZR, using Ethernet with no probabilistic constellation shaping, has a baud rate of 118.2GBd, while 800ZR+, which uses OTN and probabilistic constellation shaping, has a baud rate of up to 131.35GBd. Every symbol has a varying probability when probabilistic constellation shaping is used. “This decreases the information per symbol, and thus, the baud rate must be increased,“ says Kuschnerov.
Doubling up for 1600ZR/ ZR+, those numbers become around 236GBd and 262GBd, subject to future standardisation. “So, saying that 1600ZR is likely to be at 240GBd is correct, but one cannot state the same for a potential 1600ZR+,” says Kuschnerov.
Nokia’s view is that for 1600ZR, the industry will look at operating modes that include 16QAM at 240 GBd. Other explored options include 64-QAM with probabilistic constellation shaping at 200GBd and even dual optical carrier solutions with each carrier operating at approximately 130GBd. “However, this last option may be challenging from a power envelope perspective,” says Szilárd Zsigmond, head of Nokia’s optical subsystems group.
In turn, if 1600ZR+ reaches 1,000km distances, the emphasis will be on higher baud rate options than those used for 1600ZR. “This will be needed to enable longer reaches, which will also put pressure on managing power dissipation,” says Zsigmond.
The coherent DSP must also have digital-to-analogue (DACs) and analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs) to sample at least at 240 giga-samples per second. Indeed, the consensus among the players is that achieving the required electronics and optics will be challenging.
“All component bandwidths have to double and that is a significant challenge,” says Josef Berger, associate vice president, cloud optics marketing at Marvell.
The coherent optics – the modulators and receivers – must extend their analogue bandwidth of 120GHz. Infinera is one company that is confident this will be achieved. “Infinera, with our highly integrated Indium Phosphide-based photonic integrated circuits, will be producing a TROSA [transmitter-receiver optical sub-assembly] capable of supporting 1.6-terabit transmission that will fit in a pluggable form factor,” says Maher.
The coherent DSP and optics operating must also meet the pluggable modules’ power and heat limits. “That is an extra challenge here: the development needs to maintain focus on cost and power simultaneously to bring the value network operators need,” says Williams. “Scaling baud rate by itself doesn’t solve the challenge. We need to do this in a cost and power-efficient way.”
Current 800ZR modules consume 30W or more, and since the aim of ZR modules is to be used within Ethernet switches and routers, this is challenging. In comparison, 400ZR modules now consume 20W or less.
“For 800ZR and 800ZR+, the target is to be within the 28W range, and this target is not changing for 1600ZR and 1600ZR+,” says Zsigmond. Coherent design engineers are being asked to double the bit rate yet keep the power envelope constant.
Certain OIF members are also interested in backward compatibility with 800ZR or 400ZR. “That also might affect the design,” says Gass.
Given the rising cost to tape out a coherent DSP using 3nm and even 2nm CMOS process nodes required to reduce power per bit, most companies designing ASICs will look to develop one design for the 1600ZR and ZR+ applications to maximise their return on investment, says Zsigmond, who notes that the risk was lower for the first generations of ZR and ZR+ applications. Most companies had already developed components for long-haul applications that could be optimised for ZR and ZR+ applications.
For 400ZR, which used a symbol rate of 60 GBd, 60-70 GBd optics already existed. For 800 gigabit transmissions, high-performance embedded coherent optics and pluggable, low-power ZR/ZR+ modules have been developed in parallel. “For 1600ZR/ZR+, it appears that the pluggable modules will be developed first,” says Zsigmond. “There will be more technology challenges to address than previous ZR/ZR+ projects.”
The pace of innovation is faster than traditional coherent transmission systems and will continue to reduce cost and power per bit, notes Marvell’s Berger: “This innovation creates technologies that will migrate into traditional coherent applications as well.”
Gass is optimistic despite the challenges ahead: “You’ve got smart people in the room, and they want this to happen.”
OIF's OFC 2024 demo
The OIF has yet to finalise what it will show for the upcoming coherent pluggable module interoperable event at OFC to be held in San Diego in March. But there will likely be 400ZR and 800ZR demonstrations operating over 75km-plus spans and 400-gigabit OpenZR+ optics operating over greater distance spans.
Optical transmission: sending more data over a greater reach
Keysight Technologies' chart plots the record-setting optical transmission systems of recent years.
The chart, compiled by Dr Fabio Pittalá, product planner, broadband and photonic center of excellence at Keysight, is an update of one previously published by Gazettabyte.
The latest chart adds data from last year’s conferences at OFC 2023 and ECOC 2023. And new optical transmission achievements can be expected at the upcoming OFC 2024 show, to be held in San Diego, CA in March.
Using LED-based parallelism for fast optical interconnects
Avicena Tech has demonstrated what it claims is the world's smallest one terabit optical transceiver. And the company will reveal more about how it is advancing its optical technology for volume production at the upcoming OFC event in San Diego in March.
The interface technology uses compact light emitting diodes (LED). The interface uses an array of these microLEDs that emit light vertically into a bundle of multimode optical fibres.
Avicena demonstrated its 1 terabit-per-second (Tbps) interface at the recent Supercomputing 23 show in Colorado last November. Its interface used 304 LED-based optical channels, each carrying 3.3 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) of data for a total bandwidth of one terabit.
The transceiver design dubbed LightBundle comprises a small 16nm CMOS process chip. Measuring 3mm x 4 mm, the chip hosts the electrical interface and the optical circuitry. These include the microLEDs, each one less that 10 microns in diameter, that emit blue light.
The LEDs are arranged in 2D arrays that are flip-chipped and bonded onto the chip. The photo-detectors are also arranged in an array and connected to the LEDs via the multimode fibres.
“On the electrical side [of the Lightbundle chip], you can put any interface you want,” says Christoph Pfistner, vice president of sales and marketing at Avicena. The ASIC uses the Open Compute Project’s OpenHBI interface for the electrical interface.
The choice of OpenHBI was due to a hyperscaler customer request. But Avicena plans to use the UCIe chiplet interface for future designs.
Performance metrics
MicroLEDs offer another category of optical interfaces alongside pluggable optical modules, on-board optics, and co-packaged optics (see chart below).
Pfistner stresses that the microLED approach is complementary and does not directly compete with silicon photonics.
The microLEDs and multimode fibre result in a shorter reach interface – up to 10m – whereas silicon photonics interfaces cover a wider span. MicroLED technology is thus ideal for chip-to-chip applications such as interfacing graphics processor units (GPUs) with high-bandwidth memory (HBM). The microLED technology also benefits intra-rack links.
That said, Pfistner is keen to highlight the technology’s benefits. First, there is no need for an external laser source, and the link consumes fewer picoJoules-per-bit (pJ/b). Avicena says the channel consumes 1pJ/b and says its roadmap suggests sub-pJ/b interface energy consumption. Silicon photonics interfaces typically consume 3-5pJ/b, although the performance metric should also include the extranal laser source.
Like silicon photonics, the LED-based solution can send significant bandwidth across a small length of the chip’s edge, referred to as ‘beachfront’ density. Pfistner says the company can achieve more than 10Tbps/mm interface densities, with the company’s roadmap potentially going to 25Tbps/mm.
Given that this technology is multimode, there is also a relaxed tolerance – a few microns – to coupling the LED light source to the fibre bundle. This is a much more relaxed tolerance than single-mode fibre designs, which require sub-micron precision. More relaxed laser manufacturing tolerances means lower production costs.
The LED-based interface technology can also operate at over 150°C, much higher than traditional lasers. Operating temperatures up to 290°Chave been demonstrated in collaboration with Fred Kish’s North Carolina State University (NCSU) group, says Pfistner.
And since the chip supports non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signalling over short-reach spans, it has a latency advantage compared to optical interfaces requiring signal processing and error correction schemes to close links.
High bandwidth memory
Longer term, Avicena is eyeing the HBM opportunity. HBM uses stacked high-speed memory dies, with several HBMs seated around a processor IC. There is an ongoing race to stack more data in the HBM, overall memory for the processor such as GPUs, and faster data access speeds.
However, HBM has several constraints. First, only so many chips can be stacked on each other in part due to heat dissipation issues. The memory chip at the bottom of the stack must dissipate its heat through all the chips above it, and hot HBM stacks require frequent refresh cycles to retain data, which limits usable bandwidth.
One merit of HBM is that it uses a large bus – 1024 electrical channels wide, each at 6.4 Gbps (HBM3). This is ideal for Avicena’s microLED optical interface. HBM3E memory uses an even faster interface speed of 9.6Gbps. Meanwhile, HBM4, expected in a couple of years, aims to widen the electrical bus from 1024 to 2048 lanes to keep GPU designs fed with data.
Another issue is the size of the stacks relative to the large ASIC chip, such as a GPU. A finite chip size means only so many HBM can surround the ASIC. Due to space limits, high-end GPUs are limited to six HBMs, three stacks on each side of the chip.
Using an optical interface promises larger-capacity high-bandwidth memory designs where the stacks don’t have to be crammed around the ASIC. The memory can be located further away but still be accessible with low latency and energy consumption.
The ASIC-to-HBM interface is thus an important opportunity for short-reach optical interconnects. Moreover, two investors in Avicena are Samsung and Micron, leading memory suppliers.
Avicena’s is now focussed on preparing customer demo kits and increasing its yields before it ramps production for the first product, topics it will be discussing at OFC 2024.
Drut tackles disaggregation at a data centre scale
- Drut’s DynamicXcelerator supports up to 4,096 accelerators using optical switching and co-packaged optics. Four such clusters enable the scaling to reach 16,384 accelerators.
- The system costs less and is cheaper to run, has lower latency, and better uses the processors and memory.
- The system is an open design supporting CPUs and GPUs from different vendors.
- DynamicXcelerator will ship in the second half of 2024.
Drut Technologies has detailed a system that links up to 4,096 accelerator chips. And further scaling, to 16,384 GPUs, is possible by combining four such systems in ‘availability zones’.
The US start-up previously detailed how its design can disaggregate servers, matching the processors, accelerators, and memory to the computing task at hand. Unveiled last year, the product comprises management software, an optical switch, and an interface card that implements the PCI Express (PCIe) protocol over optics.
The product disaggregates the servers but leaves intact the tiered Ethernet switches used for networking servers across a data centre.
Now the system start-up is expanding its portfolio with a product that replaces the Ethernet switches with optical ones. “You can compose [compute] nodes and drive them using our software,” says Bill Koss, CEO of Drut.
Only Google has demonstrated the know-how to make such a large-scale flexible computing architecture using optical switching.
Company background
Drut was founded in 2018 and has raised several funding rounds since 2021.
Jitender Miglani, founder and president of Drut, previously worked at MEMS-based optical switch maker, Calient Technologies.
Drut’s goal was to build on its optical switching expertise and add the components needed to make a flexible, disaggregated computing architecture. “The aim was building the ecosystem around optical switches,” says Miglani.
The company spent its first two years porting the PCIe protocol onto an FPGA for a prototype interface card. Drut showcased its prototype product alongside a third-party optical switch as part of a SuperMicro server rack at the Supercomputing show in late 2022.
Drut has spent 2023 developing its next-generation architecture to support clusters of up to 4,096 endpoints. These can be accelerators like graphics processing units (GPUs), FPGAs, data processing units (DPUs), or storage using the NVM Express (nonvolatile memory express).
The architecture, dubbed DynamicXcelerator, supports PCIe over optics to link processors (CPUs and GPUs) and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over optics for data communications between the GPUs and between the CPUs.
The result is the DynamicXcelerator system, a large-scale reconfigurable computing for intensive AI model training and high-performance computing workloads.
DynamicXcelerator
The core of the DynamicXcelerator architecture is a photonic fabric based on optical switches. This explains why Drut uses PCIe and RDMA protocols over optics.
Optical switches brings size and flexibility and by relaying optical signals, their ports are data-rate independent.
Another benefit of optical switching is power savings. Drut says an optical switch consumes 150W whereas an equivalent-sized packet switch consumes 1,700W. On average, an Infiniband or Ethernet packet switch draws 750W when used with passive cables. Using active cables, the switch’s maximum power rises to 1,700W. “[In contrast], a 32-64-128-144 port all-optical switch draws 65-150W,” says Koss.
Drut also uses two hardware platforms. One is the PCIe Resource Unit, dubbed the PRU-2000, which hosts eight accelerator chips such as GPUs. Unlike Nvidia’s DGX platform, which uses Nvidia GPUs such as the Hopper, or Google, which uses its TPU5 tensor processor unit (TPU), Drut’s PRU-2000 is an open architecture and can use GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and others. The second class of platform is the compute node or server, which hosts the CPUs.
DynamicXcelerator’s third principal component are the FIC 2500 interface cards.
The iFIC 2500 card is similar to Drut’s current product’s iFIC 1000, which features an FPGA and four QSFP28s. However, the iFIC 2500 supports the PCIe 5.0 generation bus and the Compute Express Link (CXL) protocols. The two other FIC cards are the tFIC 2500 and rFIC 2500.
“The iFIC and tFIC are the same card, but different software images,” says Koss. “The iFIC fits into a compute node or server while the tFIC fits into our Photonic Resource Unit (PRU) unit, which holds GPUs, FPGAs, DPUs, NVMe, and the like.”
The rFIC provides RDMA over photonics for GPU-to-GPU memory sharing. The rFIC card for CPU-to-CPU memory transfers is due later in 2024.
Miglani explains that PCIe is used to connect the GPUs and CPUs, but for GPU-to-GPU communication, RDMA is used since even PCIe over photonics has limitations.
Certain applications will use hundreds and even thousands of accelerators, so a PCIe lane count is one limitation, distance is another; a 5ns delay is added for each metre of fibre. “There is a window where the PCIe specification starts to fall off,” says Miglani.
The final component is DynamicXcelerator’s software. There are two software systems: the Drut fabric manager (DFM), which controls the system’s hardware configuration and traffic flows, and the Drut software platform (DSP) that interfaces applications onto the architecture.
Co-packaged optics
Drut knew it would need to upgrade the iFIC 1000 card. DynamicXcelerator uses PCIe 5.0, each lane being 32 gigabit-per-second (Gbps). Since 16 lanes are used, that equates to 512 gigabits of bandwidth.
“That’s a lot of bandwidth, way more that you can crank out with four 100-gigabit pluggables,” says Koss, who revealed co-packaged optics will replace pluggable modules for the iFIC 2500 and tFIC 2500 cards.
The card for the iFIC and tFIC will use two co-packaged optical engines, each 8×100 gigabits. The total bandwidth of 1.6 terabits – 16×100-gigabit channels – is a fourfold increase over the iFIC 1000.
System workings
The system’s networking can be viewed as a combination of circuit switching and packet switching.
The photonic fabric, implemented as a 3D torus (see diagram), supports circuit switching. Using a 3D torus, three hops at most are needed to link any two of the system’s endpoints.
One characteristic of machine learning training, such as large language models, is that traffic patterns are predictable. This suits an architecture that can set the resources and the connectivity for a task’s duration.
Packet switching is not performed using Infiniband. Nor is a traditional spine-leaf Ethernet switch architecture used. The DynamicXcelerator does uses Ethernet but in the form of a small, distributed switching layer supported in each interface card’s FPGA.
The smallest-sized DynamicXcelerator would use two racks of stacked PRU-2000s (see diagram). Further racks would be added to expand the system.
“The idea is that you can take a very large construct of things and create virtual PODs,” says Koss. “All of a sudden, you have flexible and fluid resources.”
Koss says a system can scale to 16,384 units by combining four clusters, each of 4,096 accelerators. “Each one can be designated as an ‘availability zone’, with users able to call resources in the different zones,” he says.
Customers might use such a configuration to segment users, run different AI models, or for security reasons. “It [a 16,384 unit system] would be huge and most likely something that only a service provider would do or maybe a government agency,” says Koss.
Capital and operation savings
Drut claims the architecture costs 30 per cent less than conventional systems, while operational cost-savings are 40 per cent.
The numbers need explaining, says Koss, given the many factors and choices possible.
The bill of materials of a 16, 32, 64 or 128-GPU design has a 10-30 per cent saving solely from the interconnect.
“The bigger the fabric, the better we scale in price as solutions using tiered leaf-spine-core packet switches involving Ethernet-Infiniband-PCIe are all built around the serdes of the switch chip in the box,” says Koss. “We have a direct-connect fabric with a very high radix, which allows us to build the fabric without stacked tiers like legacy point-to-point networks.”
There are also the power savings, as mentioned. Less power means less heat and hence less cooling.
“We can also change the physical wires in the network,” says Koss, something that can’t be done with leaf-spine-core networks, unless data centre staff change the cabling.
“By grouping resources around a workload, utilisation and performance are much better,” says Koss. “Apps run faster, infrastructure is grouped around workloads, giving users the power to do more with less.”
The system’s evolution is another consideration. A user can upgrade resources because of server disaggregation and the ability to add and remove resources from active machines.
“Imagine that you bought the DynamicXcelerator in 2024. Maybe it was a small sized, four-to-six rack system of GPUs, NVMe, etc,” says Koss. If, in mid-2026, Nvidia releases a new GPU, the user can take several PRU-2000s offline and replace the existing GPUs with the new ones.
“Also if you are an Nvidia shop but want to use the new Mi300 from AMD, no problem,” says Koss. “You can mix GPU vendors with the DynamicXcelerator.” This is different from today’s experience, where what is built is wasteful, expensive, complex, and certainly not climate-conscious, says Koss.
Plans for 2024
Drut has 31 employees, 27 of which are engineers. “We are going on a hiring binge and likely will at least double the company in 2024,” says Koss. “We are hiring in engineering, sales, marketing, and operations.”
Proof-of-concept DynamicXcelerator hardware will be available in the first half of 2024, with general availability then following.
The APC’s blueprint for silicon photonics
The Advanced Photonics Coalition (APC) wants to smooth the path for silicon photonics to become a high-volume manufacturing technology.
The organisation is talking to companies to tackle issues whose solutions will benefit the photonics technology.
The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to act as an industry catalyst to prove technologies and reduce the risk associated with their development, says Jeffery Maki, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks and a member of the Advanced Photonics Coalition’s board.
Origins
The Advanced Photonics Coalition was unveiled at the Photonic-Enabled Cloud Computing (PECC) Industry Summit jointly held with Optica last October.
The Coalition was formerly known as the Coalition for On-Board Optics (COBO), an industry initiative led by Microsoft.
Microsoft wanted a standard for on-board optics, until then it was a proprietary technology. At the time, on-board optics was seen as an important stepping stone between pluggable optical modules and their ultimate successor, co-packaged optics.
After years of work developing specifications and products, Microsoft chose not to adopt on-board optics in its data centres. Although COBO added other work activities, such as co-packaged optics, the organisation lost momentum and members.
Maki stresses that COBO always intended to tackle other work besides its on-board optics starting point.
Now, this is the Advanced Photonics Coalition’s goal: to have a broad remit to create working groups to address a range of issues.
Tackling technologies
Many standards organisations publish specifications but leave the implementation technologies to their member companies. In contrast, the Advanced Photonics Coalition is taking a technology focus. It wants to remove hurdles associated with silicon photonics to ease its adoption.
“Today, we see the artificial intelligence and machine learning opportunities growing, both in software and hardware,” says Maki. “We see a need in the coming years for more hardware and innovative solutions, especially in power, latency, and interconnects.”
Work Groups
In the past, systems vendors like Cisco or Juniper drove industry initiatives, and other companies fell in line. More recently, it was the hyperscalers that took on the role.
There is less of that now, says Maki: “We have a lot of companies with technologies and good ideas, but there is not a strong leadership.”
The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to fill that void and address companies’ common concerns in critical areas. “Key customers will then see the value of, and be able to access, that standard or technology that’s then fostered,” says Maki.
The Advanced Photonics Coalition has yet to announce new working groups but it expects to do so in 2024.
One area of interest is silicon photonics foundries and their process design kits (PDKs). Each foundry has a PDK, made up of tools, models, and documentation, to help engineers with the design and manufacture of photonic integrated devices.
“A starting point might be support for more than one foundry in a multi-foundry PDK,” says Maki. “Perhaps a menu item to select the desired foundry where more than one foundry has been verified to support.”
Silicon photonics has long been promoted as a high-volume manufacturing technology for the optical industry. “But it is not if it has been siloed into separate efforts such that there is not that common volume,” says Maki.
Such a PDK effort would identify gaps that each foundry would need to fill. “The point is to provide for more than one foundry to be able to produce the item,” he says.
A company is also talking to the Advanced Photonics Coalition about co-packaged optics. The company has developed an advanced co-packaged optics solution, but it is proprietary.
“Even with a proprietary offering, one can make changes to improve market acceptance,” says Maki. The aim is to identify the areas of greatest contention and remedy them first, for example, the external laser source. “Opening that up to other suppliers through standards adoption, existing or new, is one possibility,” he says.
The Advanced Photonics Coalition is also exploring optical interconnecting definitions with companies. “How we do fibre-attached to silicon photonics, there’s a desire that there is standardisation to open up the market more,” says Maki. “That’s more surgical but still valuable.”
And there are discussions about a working group to address co-packaged optics for the radio access network (RAN). Ericsson is one company interested in co-packaged optics for the RAN. Another working group being discussed could tackle optical backplanes.
Maki says there are opportunities here to benefit the industry.
“Companies should understand that nothing is slowing them down or blocking them from doing something other than their ingenuity or their own time,” he says.
Status
COBO had 50 members earlier in 2023. Now, the membership listed on the website has dropped to 39 and the number could further dip; companies that joined for COBO may still decide to leave.
At the time of writing, an new as yet unannounced member has joined the Advanced Photonics Coalition, taking the membership to 40.
“Some of those companies that left, we think they will return once we get the working groups formed,” says Maki, who remains confident that the organisation will play an important industry role.
“Every time I have a conversation with a company about the status of the market and the needs that they see for the coming years, there’s good alignment amongst multiple companies,” he says.
There is an opportunity for an organisation to focus on the implementation aspects and the various technology platforms and bring more harmony to them, something other standards organisations don’t do, says Maki.
Books of 2023 - Final part
Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In the final part, contributions are from Larry Dennison, Tim Doiron, Catherine White and Neil McRae.
Larry Dennison, Network Research Group, Nvidia
At this point in my life, book reading is to unwind and is mostly fiction. I get nearly everything else from reading selected technical papers, the daily news and Real Clear Politics. There is just so much cognitive dissonance in the news and editorials that I retreat into fantasy for some down-time.
The best books for me this year are the Beware of Chicken series. This is a light-hearted, martial arts/ cultivation world. Most of the world believes that ‘one strives for the heavens alone’. The main protagonist believes that ‘everything is connected’ and that relationships and doing the right thing are most important. This creates a central set of likeable characters who prevail and grow when challenges arise.
The other series is The Wandering Inn, a truly massive work with a multitude of likable and unlikable characters. Very rich world building, the main character is Erin who was transported from Earth and becomes an inn keeper. Erin sees the good in nearly everyone, including goblins, which results in her finding ways of dispelling prejudice. It isn’t always happy but there is always a sense of noble conduct.
Tim Doiron, Vice President, Solution Marketing, Infinera
In recent years, my reading has leaned toward technology, leadership, marketing, and history. However, with a son who recently completed his master’s degree in psychology, I found myself in 2023 developing an interest in topics related to human behavior and how people are wired.
In parallel with my newfound interest in psychology, I was asked to give a presentation at one of our recent leadership events. In that presentation, I referenced four books that had an impact on me and my thinking in 2023.
Three of these books were written in the past few years and the fourth is an older one that I revisited to prepare for my presentation. I’ll explain.
The first book is Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist and well-known author. In Think Again, Grant identifies four styles commonly used to approach problems: preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist. While each of these approaches might be useful under certain situations, Grant argues that we should spend more time thinking like a scientist. We need to remain curious, challenging our own positions and assumptions and inviting others around us to do the same.
The world is changing fast, and positions that were accurate yesterday may not hold for today or tomorrow. For most of us in the technology industry, thinking like a scientist might come naturally, but we may not always apply it when making tradeoffs or debating strategies with colleagues. The second book is Dare to Lead: Bare Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brenee Brown.
Brown is a research professor and storyteller in areas of shame, empathy, courage, and vulnerability. Brown has worked with all types of companies and organisations. To be courageous, you must be vulnerable. And vulnerability involves fear, uncertainty, and risk. If you find yourself thinking about effective leadership, this is a great book.
If we are going to think like a scientist and be courageous leaders, how do we solidify and anchor change in our organizations and our companies? That’s where John P. Kotter’s Leading Change comes in. I read this book 20 years ago and revisited it in preparation for my leadership presentation. We need to anchor change in the company culture if it’s going to stick. While this book isn’t new, the eight steps Kotter outlines for helping transform any organisation remain relevant.
Finally, as a marketeer I am always thinking about effective communications. Earlier this year, one of my colleagues at Infinera shared Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz.
In our digital and social-media infused life, the ability to deliver relevant, concise, and impactful information has never been more important. This book provided some useful tips and scenarios and was a fast read. Maybe I don’t need to write all those white papers after all. Nice!
Catherine White, Researcher, Optical and Quantum technology, BT.
One book I read is Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis.
Technology has contributed to creating more waste than providing good solutions to solving the harm waste creates. There is also much work to be done to reclaim valuable materials.
At BT, there are programmes to reclaim and recycle materials from technical waste, among other initiatives for sustainability. For example, BT Group looks to circular networks in sustainability drive.
Wasteland is well written and brings home – in great detail – what we all basically know and must not ignore. It is also a fascinating, and sometimes horrifying journey waste takes once we say goodbye to it.
Another book I read is Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence by James Lovelock. I am a great admirer of Lovelock and his early work on ecology. He was a brilliant, multi-talented engineer, and his Gaia theory, though it has a New Age association to some people, was based on computer simulations.
Lovelock lived for over a century, and his final book was published a few years ago, providing a startling vision of the future in which the predominant new intelligent life forms of the galaxy will be artificial, and the first of them (at least on this planet) created by us.
I am not sure he is right. I hope he is not because the thought is unsettling (though he has been proved to be prescient about many things). But his ideas are thought-provoking, even as a strawman to criticise, and it is the final work of a great individual.
During a break in Devon, I picked up a secondhand copy of a book of short stories The Rest of the Robots by the classic sci-fi author, Isaac Asimov.
It’s not his best robot book but I found an interesting story within this book in which the robotic proof-reader makes changes to the meaning of the text it is correcting, to match hard coded AI ethical rules that subsume other rules, with unintended effects.
Asimov had remarkable perception of the future but reading his work makes it clear he did not go far enough in predicting the sophistication with which AI would be able to reason. However, he was right about the unpredictability, and that is the key message for me. We finally need a robot psychologist like Asimov’s Susan Calman!
Neil McRae, Chief Network Strategist, Juniper Networks
The first book I read earlier this year was I May Be Wrong: And Other Wisdoms from Life as a Forest Monk, by Björn Natthiko Lindeblad.
I was recommended to read this by a friend. He recommended the book to help me with a big change in my life that I was going through, having left the company I worked for 12 years and sensing it was going to be more difficult than I might like to admit.
The book is the story of the author, a monk in Thailand. What I liked about this book is how closely the author seemed to mirror my thinking but from a totally different vantage point and wildly different life choices. He illustrates the struggle of being a monk and the realities of life, but it also teaches that the simplest things will make a difference in the world.
I found this approach inspiring, and the ending, well, I’m not going to give it away, but in a world where mental health is increasingly important, this energised me and got me moving on my next journey much quicker.
Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars: The Story of the First American Woman to Command a Space Mission by Eileen Collins and Jonathan Ward is the amazing life story of Eileen Collins, the first female Space Shuttle Command and Pilot.
I have been fortunate to meet Eileen on many occasions, and the book surprised me in the way that Eileen had to deal with some brutal highs and lows, with immense mental strength during difficult times for her and for NASA and the Space Shuttle programme, and then the pressure of being the public face of the return to flight programme.
She is known for being the first female space shuttle pilot and commander, but Eileen was also the first woman to fly the F-15 fighter jet.
The book tells me that if you are determined enough and hungry enough, the sky is not the limit.
Broadcoms taps AI to improve switch chip traffic analysis
Broadcom’s Trident 5-X12 networking chip is the company’s first to add an artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing engine.
Data centre operators can use their network traffic to train the chip’s neural network. The Trident 5’s inference engine, dubbed the Networking General-purpose Neural-network Traffic-analyzer or NetGNT, is loaded with the resulting trained model to classify traffic and detect security threats.
“It is the first time we have put a neural network focused on traffic analysis into a chip,” says Robin Grindley, principal product line manager with Broadcom’s Core Switching Group.
Adding an inference engine shows how AI can complement traditional computation, in this case, packet processing.
Trident family
Trident is one of Broadcom’s main three lines of networking and switch chips, the Jericho and Tomahawk being the other two.
Service providers favour the Jericho family for high-end IP routing applications. The Ethernet switch router chip’s features include a programmable pipeline and off-chip store for large traffic buffering and look-up tables.
The latest Jericho 3, the 28.8 terabits-per-sec (Tbps) Jericho 3, was announced in September. Broadcom launched the first family device, the Jericho3-AI, earlier this year; a chip tailored for AI networking requirements.
In contrast, Broadcom’s Tomahawk Ethernet network switch family addresses the data centre operators’ needs. The Tomahawk has a relatively simple fixed packet-processing pipeline to deliver the highest switching capacity. The Tomahawk 5 has a capacity of 51.2 terabits and includes 512, 100-gigabit PAM4 serialiser-deserializer (serdes).
“The big hyperscalers want maximum bandwidth and maximum radix [switches],” says Grindley. “The hyperscalers have a pretty simple fabric network and do everything else themselves.”
The third family, the Trident Ethernet switch chips, is popular for enterprise applications. Like the Jericho, the Trident has a programmable pipeline to address enterprise networking tasks such as Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), tunnelling protocols, and segment routing (SRv6).
The speeds and timelines of the various Tomahawk and Trident chips are shown in the chart.
Trident 5-X12
The Trident 5-X12 is implemented using a 5nm CMOS process and has a capacity of 16 terabits. The chip’s input-output includes 160, 100-gigabit PAM4 serdes. These are the serdes that Broadcom introduced with the Tomahawk 5.
The first chip of each new generation of Trident usually has the highest capacity and is followed by lower-capacity devices tailored to particular markets.
Trident 5 is aimed at top-of-rack switch applications. Typically, 24 or 48 ports of the top-of-rack switch are used for downlinks to connect to servers, while 4 or 8 are used for higher-capacity uplinks (see diagram).
The Trident 5 can support 48 ports of 200 gigabits for the downlinks and eight 800 gigabit for the uplinks. To support 800-gigabit interfaces, the chip uses eight 100-gigabit serdes and an one-chip 800-gigabit media access controller (MAC). Other top-of-rack switch configurations are shown in the diagram.
Currently, 400-gigabit network interface cards are used for demanding applications such as machine learning. Trident5 is also ready to transition to 800-gigabit network interface cards.
Another Tomahawk feature the Trident 5 has adopted is cognitive routing, a collection of congestion management techniques for demanding machine-learning workloads.
One of the techniques is global load balancing. Previous Trident devices supported dynamic load balancing, where the hardware could see the congested port and adapt in real-time. However, such a technique gives no insight into what happens further along the flow path. “If I knew that, downstream, somebody else was congested, then I could make a smarter decision,” says Grindley. Global load balancing does just this. It sends notification to the routing chips upstream that there is congestion so they can all work together.
Another cognitive routing feature is drop congestion notification. Here, packets dropped due to congestion are captured such that what is sent is only their header data and where the packet was dropped. This mechanism improves flow completion times compared to normal packet loss, which is costly for machine-learning workloads.
Trident 5, like its predecessor, Trident 4, has a heterogeneous pipeline of tile types. The tiles contain static random-access memory (SRAM), ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) or arithmetic logic units. The tiles allow multiple look-ups or actions in parallel at each stage in the pipeline.
Broadcom has a compiler that maps high-level packet-processing functions to its pipeline in the NPL programming language. The latency through the device stays constant, however the packet processing is changed, says Grindley.
Trident 5’s NetGNT inference engine is a new pipeline resource for higher-level traffic patterns. “NexGNT looks at things not at a packet-by-packet level, but across time and the overall packet flow through the network,” says Grindley.
The NetGNT
Until now system architects and network operation centre staff have defined a set of static rules written in software to uncover and treat suspicious packet flows. “A pre-coded set of rules is limited in its ability to catch higher-level traffic patterns,” says Grindley.
When Broadcom started the Trident 5 design, its engineers thought a neural network approach could be used. “We knew it would be useful if you had something that looked at a higher level, and we knew neural networks could do this kind of task,” says Grindley.
The neural network sits alongside the existing traffic analysis logic. Information such as packet headers, or data already monitored and generated by the pipeline, can be fed to the neural network to assess the traffic patterns.
“It sits there and looks for high-level patterns such as the start of a denial of service attack” says Grindley.
Training
The neural network is trained using supervised learning. A human expert must create the required training data and train the model using supervised learning. The result is a set of weights loaded onto the Trident 5’s neural network.
When the neural network is triggered, i.e. when it identifies a pattern of interest, the Trident 5 must decide what it should do. The chip can drop the packets or change the quality of service (QoS). The device can also drop a packet while creating a mirror packet containing headers and metadata. This can then be sent to a central analyser at the network operations centre to perform higher-level management algorithms.
Performance
The Trident 5 chip is now sampling. Broadcom says there is no performance data as end customers are still to train and run live traffic through the Trident 5’s inference engine.
“What it can do for them depends on getting good data and then running the training,” says Grindley. “Nobody has done this yet.”
Will the inference engine be used in other Broadcom networking chips?
“It depends on the market,” says Grindley. “We can replicate it, just like taking IP from the Tomahawk where appropriate.”
Books of 2023 - Part 3
Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part 3, Noam Mizrahi, Katharine Schmidtke, Steve Suarez, and Vladimir Kozlov share their readings of the year.
Noam Mizrahi, EVP, corporate CTO at Marvell.
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek is a book about the obvious. It is so obvious, in fact, that it is very hard to do. We all want our message to get through so that people understand, see things through our eyes and share our vision.
When we start a journey, we know very well why we do it. This is also when we inspire and motivate the most, ourselves and others. But, as we develop our company, products and careers, intuitively, routine makes us focus on what we do and how we do it, and in some (or many) cases, we forget why we do it.
Once we forget the why, it is harder for us to experience a sense of accomplishment and, in most cases, will make it harder for us to inspire others to follow our vision.
Focus on the why as a means for inspiration and motivation. I find this simple advice something I always try to remember and in everything I do.
This book did not necessarily tell me what to do or how to do it, but I sure know why it was vital for me to read it.
Katharine Schmidtke, Ph.D., Eribel Systems LLC
Integrated Photonics for Data Communications Applications, Edited by Madeleine Glick, Ling Liao, and Katharine Schmidtke (2023), is the book I definitely read most in 2023!
This book, the inaugural volume in a series on integrated photonics, is a testament to the collaborative expertise inspired by Prof. Kimerling at MIT. It is the culmination of a three-year collaboration between co-editors Madeleine, Ling and me. We are incredibly grateful to the over ninety authors, each a leader in the field, whose technical expertise shines through and makes the content enriching and inspiring.
Diving into the world of advanced photonic devices and integrated photonic circuits, the book explores key concepts, design principles, performance metrics, and manufacturing processes. It goes beyond the theoretical, offering a comprehensive view of the practical aspects crucial for understanding and advancing this field.
One of the book’s strengths is its examination of the current trends and commercial requirements in data communication for data centres and high-performance computing. The inclusion of contributions from end users sharing key performance indicators adds a valuable real-world perspective.
At its core, the book dissects the fundamental building blocks of integrated photonics, unravelling the complexities of lasers, modulators, photodetectors, and passive devices. It’s a holistic journey through the individual elements that collectively form the intricate web of photonic integrated circuits.
Over the summer, I was back in England clearing out old bookshelves and discovered the series of spy novels by the British writer, John le Carré. I picked up The Little Drummer Girl, published in 1983. The story follows the manipulations of Martin Kurtz, an Israeli spymaster who intends to kill Khalil – a Palestinian terrorist who is bombing Jewish-related targets in Europe, particularly Germany – and Charlie, an English actress and double agent working on behalf of the Israelis.
It’s a thrilling and complex plot with many unexpected twists and turns, but this story has no heroes. Everyone loses something, including Charlie, who loses her mind. Reading it forty years after its writing, I experienced déjà vu during the events which started on October 7th, 2023.
I’ve had the book Narrative and Numbers: The Value of Stories in Business, by Aswath Damodaran on my reading list since its publication in 2017, and it certainly lived up to the anticipation.
The author delves into the intricacies of valuing companies, offering a profound analysis beyond the numbers. What sets this book apart is its exploration of the transformative power of storytelling in the business world.
As engineers, we often underestimate the impact of a well-crafted narrative. The author argues that a logical and rational story, when presented effectively, can breathe life into facts and figures.
The book emphasizes the importance of storytelling in making data understandable and unforgettable. The art of storytelling is revealed to be a compelling force that captivates audiences, making it challenging to dismiss even seemingly improbable valuations.
What struck me was the insight into how companies, seemingly without substantial revenue, can achieve remarkably high valuations.
By reading this book, you gain a deeper understanding of the alchemy that occurs when a compelling story intertwines with the cold, hard metrics of business. It’s a valuable read, shedding light on the often-underestimated influence of narrative in shaping perceptions and valuations.
Von der Nutzlosigkeit Erwachsen zu Werden, by Georg Heinzen and Uwe Koch (1994) can be translated as ‘Growing up from Uselessness’ or, because it’s a double entendre, ‘About the Uselessness of Growing up’.
The book is a farce about a tragic victim of the German education crisis of the 1970s and the job market of the 1990s. At thirty, still unemployed and living at home, this hopeless character discovers that having graduated high school, his education is helpful for everything but not needed for anything.
I wasn’t educated in Germany, but this mood was contagious throughout the rest of Europe, and I, too, struggled to get my first job during the recession of the 1990s.
Reading it now, with two teenagers preparing to launch themselves into the workforce in a few years, I’m sure they feel the same way. This might seem to be a depressing topic for me to dwell on, but the book is a fun read filled with ironic humour and many relevant topics for today.
Steve Suarez, Founder & CEO of HorizonX
This year marked a significant milestone for me. I took the courageous step of pursuing my lifelong aspiration of entrepreneurship. My goal is to empower organisations to innovate effectively and at scale. In a world where innovation is consistent and a requisite, there is a demand for skilled professionals who can excel in this realm across all industries and geographies.
To equip myself, I recognised the necessity to acquire new competencies, particularly in sales and the fundamentals of operating a thriving consulting business. To this end, I started listening to The Consulting Bible: How to Launch and Grow a Seven-Figure Consulting Business, by Alan Weiss, 2nd Edition in audiobook format, which I listened to during my commutes to London.
The insights have been invaluable. It has sharpened my focus on what drives business success and has influenced my approach to consulting. The lessons learned have been instrumental in shaping my entrepreneurial journey, allowing me to concentrate on strategies that make an impact.
I am eager to share more about how these learnings have transformed my business practices and the innovative solutions I can offer clients.
Vlad Kozlov, CEO and founder of LightCounting Market Research
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong, reads like poetry, but it offers the depth of a Ph.D thesis, or several, with its range of topics.
You may already know that bats navigate the world using echolocation. Still, it works and it is fascinating, an incredible level of complexity chiselled by evolution over millennia, one mutation at a time. Even a recovering communist may wonder if evolution can do such a feat.
The book is dense and you have to take it in slowly. I’m almost finished now, and the most incredible chapter so far was on electric fields. Not about hundreds of volts that stingrays use but weak electric fields that many fish use to navigate murky waters. Unbelievable.
I am saving the next chapter on magnetic fields for the holidays.
A must read for anyone interested in high-tech innovation. Yes, this is a cutting edge technology. It is also a journey into a parallel world, or worlds, of creatures around us. What drives them remains a mystery, but all of them are caused by something in their lives. And it is more than just hunger.
Books of 2023 - Part 2
Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part 2, Alan Liu, Yves LeMaitre, and, in this case, the editor of Gazettabyte list their recommended reads.
Alan Liu, CEO & Co-Founder at Quintessent Inc.
One book that left a deep impression on me is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a recounting and reflection by the author of his time as a prisoner in various concentration camps during WWII.
I listened to the audiobook mostly during commutes to work at the beginning of the year. Whatever challenges awaited me for the day, no matter how big, they seemed less daunting when reframed against the book’s stories.
The extreme deprivation and suffering described also gave me a deeper appreciation for the basic creature comforts of modern life that we enjoy (such as food, shelter, and coffee), which are easy to take for granted due to their constancy.
Yves LeMaitre, CEO of AstroBeam
Let me start with my favourite spy novel writer, John Le Carre. Pick any of his books. I just read his first small novel from 1961: Call for the Dead.
I recommend starting with his first major success, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and if you like it, work your way to more recent books relevant to today’s tumultuous world: The Little Drummer Girl and A Most Wanted Man. Hopefully, it will bring you with an alternative viewpoint on some of today’s geopolitical hotspots
As the world continues to accept more diversity, if you want to glimpse Native American culture, try the easy path of the Tony Hillerman mystery books.
Then follow up with a trip to the Navajo and Hopi reservations in the Southwest. I promise it will change completely your views of the US history and Indian land ownership and occupation.
My favourite is A Thief of Time: A Leaphorn and Chee Novel but you can safely pick any of his books.
If you want to have the best Native guides in the Southwest, call my friend, Louis Williams, at Ancient Wayves River and Hiking Adventures: Guided Tours. He will make you discover the world of Diné and the incredible mystery of the lost Anasazi people.
Last summer, we had the best rafting trip on the San Juan River with his team, with incredible hikes in hidden canyons discovering ruins and artefacts left behind by the Ancient People.
Roy Rubenstein, Editor, Gazettabyte
One reading topic of continual interest is Israel. I have also listened to more podcasts this year and am a big fan of long-read articles.
I’m reading Isabel Kershner’s book: The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for Its Inner Soul. Kershner is the New York Times’s veteran correspondent in Israel. There is no shortage of books by journalists impacted by covering Israel. This is a timely primer for anyone wanting to understand the complexities of Israel.
Kai Bird is known for co-authoring the book on Robert Oppenheimer that was the basis of this year’s blockbuster film. But years ago he wrote a biography about CIA intelligence officer, Robert Aimes. Aimes was an outstanding character who served in the Middle East and died in the truck bomb assault on the US embassy in Beirut in 1983. Aimes got the Americans to talk to the PLO, ultimately leading to the Oslo Peace Accords.
Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty is another revisited book. The author is a psychologist and a leading authority on autism. Early in the book, he explains that he has an issue with the word ‘Evil’. In it, he explores why certain people cannot read, or don’t care, how others feel. He discusses the brain and structures such as the empathy circuit function. Empathy is absent when the circuit doesn’t work. However, the effects can vary significantly: people with autism differ from psychopaths. Why the circuit may malfunction is complex. It involves genetics, social, and environmental issues. The book, published in 2011, gives a different view on how to think about and treat cruelty.
In 2014, Prof Baron-Cohen co-signed a letter to The Times (of London) addressed to the leaders in Israel and Gaza that ends with the word empathy: “So, we say to the leaders of Israel and Hamas, please sit down, talk without table thumping, listen to each other and start a new politics based on the principles of respect, dignity, and empathy.”
One of my best reads is the book Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family, by Daniel Finkelstein. It combines a period of upheaval in Europe and the Soviet Union with the survival of the author’s parents – who eventually meet and settle in Hendon, North London.
The book describes the history happening around two individuals who spent the rest of their lives bringing up their children in a loving home. The tale is remarkable and moving, including an early chapter where the author pays tribute to his father.
I met Finkelstein’s parents in the early 1990s but knew nothing of their story. I was also at Daniel’s sister’s wedding and remember being incredibly moved by the father’s speech.
Jonathan Raban is an author I lost track of only for him to resurface in the obituary columns, sadly. I realise he had moved to the US two decades ago.
His last book, Father and Son: A Memoir, is just out: about his recovery from a stroke coupled with the story of his parents and their love letters while separated during WWII.
Raban is a beautiful writer. “A nurse had assisted me into the wheelchair, and I was dozing there when Julia (his daughter) arrived to visit. The oddity of the situation made us both shy. We were deferential newcomers to the conventions of the hospital, like tourists with lowered voices tiptoeing around a foreign cathedral.
Lastly, The Atlantic and The New Yorker magazines published some great articles on AI this year:
- Talk to Me: Can artificial intelligence allow us to speak to another species?
- Geoffrey Hinton: It’s far too late to stop AI
- Does Sam Altman Know What he is Creating?
- How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution
- The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI
Books in 2023
Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. William Koss, Dean Bubley and Scott Wilkinson kick off this year’s recommended reads.
William R Koss, CEO at Drut Technologies
My 2023 reading list is less than normal as the year has been full of technical reading and presentation materials for work. I enjoy history books as well as business history that tell the rise and fall of some company, industry or person.
In Progress
Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring by Gordon W. Prange: I picked this book out of Amazon’s recommendation list. Gordon Prange being the author of At Dawn We Slept and Tora, Tora, Tora. Currently plowing through this book that was unfinished at the time of his death.
The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge. My knowledge of the Crusades was thin and I was looking for a book that provided a grand overview. So far it has not disappointed, but I have had to familiarize myself with many new names.
Completed Reads
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest by Stephen E. Ambrose. A second read for me as I watched the series on Netflix over the summer and the thought occurred to read the book and compare and contrast the series to the book. Ambrose is a wonderful writer.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis. I was raising venture capital during the crypto craze from the same firms SBF raised capital and I admit that reading this book is part schadenfreude.
Circle of Treason: CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed by Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille.A second read for me. Something triggered the thought of Aldrich Ames and I read the book in two days.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. A very fun read and puts into perspective the speed of news and information that we enjoy today. People thought along the time scale of years in the 1700s
This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History by T.R. Fehrenbach. My father was in the Korean War and I have read many a book on the subject. It was a new read for me.
Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, and America’s Greatest Marathon by John Brant. My hobby is road cycling, but I have a colleague who has run the Boston Marathon a few times. The Boston Marathon route is within walking distance of my house and my colleague recommended this book as the best book written on marathon racing. I finished it on a couple of airplane rides.
Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams. A complete disappointment. The book was recommended by a former colleague and I just did not find all the personal details that interesting. I think I was hoping for a better read along the lines of the series Succession which had just ended and that was the reason for my reading.
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert K. Massie. Robert Massie is a master historian. One of the greats of our time. I have read Dreadnaught and Castles of Steel a few times. This book is master level history telling. Magnificent in all regards. Sections of the book can be read as short books. The story of Von Spee’s journey from the Pacific to Atlantic could be a single book. I am about to start his book Nicholas and Alexandra about the fall of the Romanov Dynasty.
Dean Bubley, technology industry analyst & futurist at Disruptive Analysis
A recent stand-out for me is Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway.
I found the book fascinating. It helped me gain a new angle on a lot of the issues faced in the economy and society overall, as well as specific bits of the tech sector.
It tells the stories of the production, processing, transport and use of some of the core minerals we use throughout society and technology. The book covers:
- sand/silicon used for concrete and also semiconductors and optical fibre
- lithium for batteries
- copper for cables, generators and motors
- oil & gas and why they’re still necessary at least for creating products rather than combustion (such as carbon anodes in batteries)
- salt(s) for multiple purposes
- iron & steel
One of the things I often realise is that it is easy to get wrapped up in technology including telecoms. We talk about virtualisation, AI, cloud, orchestration and software all the time.
There’s also a lot of physics. I often talk about radio spectrum and wireless propagation, including 5G and WiFi indoors and through walls. But I don’t pay much attention to the chemistry and materials involved.
This book poses some hard questions, such as where we get enough lithium (and also cobalt and other metals) for decarbonisation, or enough copper for new generators and grid capacity.
My takeout is that the next 20-30 years involve a tightrope walk, buffeted by the winds of physical materials, economics, geopolitics and hidden dependencies. It’s all very well saying ‘just stop doing X’, but sometimes (at least some) of X is essential in order to continue making Y or doing Z.
We also must be careful not just about “supplier diversity” for complex systems like radio access network equipment, or even the components and chips, but all the way down to the raw materials, which may be mined or refined in only a few places around the world.
Worth a read or a listen. I’m an audiobook devotee & this is narrated well enough to listen at 3x speed.
Scott Wilkinson, lead analyst, networking components, Cignal AI
There have been several books this year that I recommended to friends and colleagues. The Cartel by Don Winslow provides unique insights (for fiction) into the crisis at the southern US border.
My son, a Biomechanical Engineering Master’s student at Virginia Tech, and I both read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. It’s like candy to engineers and I enjoyed discussing it with him as he made his way through the chapters.
I recently finished Rod Chernow’s massive biography, Grant, which was fascinating on every page, especially to those who were erroneously taught that he was a mediocre general who won the Civil War due only to attrition and not due to his strategic genius.
But the one book that I recommend the most to my engineering colleagues and history fans is The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough. I’ve read several of McCullough’s histories, but never got around to reading this, his first. The Great Bridge tells the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was an engineering feat that is hard to comprehend today.
Anyone driving or taking a subway train across the East River nay have difficulty imagining a time when Brooklyn and Manhattan were separate cities. The only way to get from one to the other was by ferry, and the residents in Brooklyn were worried that any more permanent connection might bring NYC corruption across the river. Washington Roebling took over the project when his father unexpectedly died early in the planning stages. With only his mind and his pencil, he designed every aspect of the bridge from the caissons sunk deep into the river to the cables spanning the towers. Plagued by an unknown disease he contracted after repeatedly descending into the pressurized caissons (what we now know as the bends), Roebling – and his very underappreciated wife, Emily – nevertheless managed a feat that boggles the mind, especially for engineers who let computers do the heavy lifting today.
The book describes challenges ranging from river currents to corruption to political interference, and parallels to modern times are not hard to make. Yet, almost 100 years later, when the bridge was inspected, the only recommendation was to add a coat of paint. The engineering is breathtaking, but the ability of the Chief Engineer to accomplish it with the tools of his time and with all of the roadblocks thrown up is awe-inspiring.
On a recent visit to New York to visit my daughter during her internship at the AMNH, I tried to convince the family to all travel down to the Brooklyn Bridge, just to look at it again in person. I was overruled, but that’s ok. It’ll still be there the next time, and for a long time after.