ECOC '22 Reflections - Final Part

Gazettabyte has been asking industry and academic figures for their thoughts after attending ECOC 2022, held last month in Basel, Switzerland. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned, and what, if anything, surprised them.

In the final part, Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi of Coherent, Acacia’s Tom Williams, ADVA’s Jörg-Peter Elbers and Fabio Pittalà of Keysight Technologies share their thoughts.

Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi, Chief Marketing Officer, Coherent

The ECOC event represents an excellent opportunity for us - a vertically-integrated manufacturer selling at all levels of the value chain - to meet with customers, end-customers and partners/ suppliers.

There was a refreshing sense of optimism and excitement for optical communications, driven by relentless bandwidth growth, despite the macroeconomic backdrop.

The roadmap for optical transceivers is dictated by the electrical interface used for Ethernet switch chips. We have seen that play out yet again for 100-gigabit electrical lanes used for 25-terabit and 50-terabit Ethernet switches.

Several transceiver suppliers demonstrated products with 100 gigabit-per-lane electrical interfaces in quad and octal form factors. The optical lane of a transceiver typically begins at the same speed as the electrical lane and then progresses to a faster rate. This transition should be expected for 800-gigabit transceivers as well.

While 100 gigabit-per-lane transceivers, such as the 800G-DR8 and the 2x400G-FR4 devices, there were devices demonstrated that enable the transition to optical 200-gigabit lanes. It was satisfying to see a warm response for the demonstration of Coherent’s 200-gigabit electro-absorption modulated laser (EML) and Semtech’s 200-gigabit EML driver. I am confident that direct detection will play a predominant role in 800-gigabit and 1.6-terabit data centre links.

Despite the great interest in co-packaged optics, nearly all the working demonstrations at the show used pluggable transceiver modules. Industry colleagues are preparing for pluggable transceiver modules using the next 200-gigabit electrical interface. Indeed, at ECOC, there was an OIF-CEI 224G demo by Keysight and Synopsys.

One key topic at the show concerned whether ‘coherent lite’ or direct detect is the preferred solution for data centres and edge aggregation. The debate remains open and no one solution fits all. It will depend on the specific application and architecture. A broad portfolio supported by different technology platforms frees you to select the best approach to serve the customer’s needs.

I saw the industry responding to the need for disaggregation and innovative solutions for access and telecom. Coherent’s 100G ZR announcement is one such example, as well as the extra performance of high-power 400ZR+ coherent transceivers.

We started this trend and we now see others announcing similar solutions.

Arista’s demo, which featured 400ZR connections over a 120km data centre interconnect (DCI) link, enabled by our pluggable optical line system in a QSFP form factor, received much attention and interest.

Tom Williams, Senior Director of Marketing for Acacia, now part of Cisco.

Many of us are still of a mindset where any opportunity to get together and see industry friends and colleagues is a great show.

My focus is very much on the success of 400-gigabit pluggable coherent solutions.

We’ve been talking about these products for a long time, back to the initial OIF 400ZR project starting in late 2016. Since then, 400ZR/ZR+ has been a hot topic at every conference.

The commercial success of these solutions, and the impact that they’re having on network architectures, has been gratifying. These products have ramped in volumes not seen by any previous coherent technology.

The industry has done a great job at 400 gigabits, striking the right balance of power and performance. Now, we’re looking at 800 gigabits and working through some of the same questions. Discussions around 1.6 terabits have even started.

Much work is still required but what we heard from customers at ECOC is that the trend toward pluggable coherent will likely continue.

Jörg-Peter Elbers, Senior Vice President, Advanced Technology, Standards and IPR at ADVA

‘Never say never’ captures well ECOC’s content. There was no one groundbreaking idea but topics discussed in the past are back on the agenda, either because of a need or the technology has progressed.

Here are several of my ECOC takeaways:

• The 130 gigabaud (GBd) class of coherent optics is coming, and the generation after that - 240GBd - is on the horizon.
• Coherent optics continue to push towards the edge. Will there be a Very-High Speed Coherent PON after 50G High-Speed PON?
• Whether co-packaged optics or front-pluggable modules, electro-photonic integration is rapidly advancing with some interesting industry insights shared at the conference.
• Quantum-safe communication is becoming part of the regular conference program.
• Optical Satcom is gaining traction. Optical ground-to-space links are promising yet challenging.

Fabio Pittalà, Product Planner, Broadband and Photonics – Center of Excellence, Keysight Technologies

This was my first ECOC as an employee of Keysight. I spent most of my time at the exhibition introducing the new high-speed Keysight M8199B Arbitrary Waveform Generator.

There were a lot of discussions focusing on technologies enabling the next Ethernet rates. There is a debate about intensity-modulation direct detection (IMDD) versus coherent but also what modulation format, symbol rate or degree of parallelisation.

While the industry is figuring out the best solution, researchers achieved important milestones by transmitting the highest symbol rate and the highest net bitrate.

Nokia Bell-Labs demonstrated record-breaking transmission of 260-gigabaud dual-polarisation quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) over 100km single-mode fibre.

Meanwhile, NTT broke the net bitrate record by transmitting more than 2 terabit-per-second using a probabilistic-constellation-shaped dual-polarisation quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-QAM) over different data centre links.