ECOC 2022 Reflections - Part 1

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

In Part 1, Infinera's David Welch, Cignal AI's Scott Wilkinson, University of Cambridge's Professor Seb Savory, and Huawei's Maxim Kuschnerov share their thoughts.

David Welch, Chief Innovation Officer and Founder of Infinera

First, we had great meetings. It was exciting to be back to a live, face-to-face industry event. It was also great to see strong attendance from so many European carriers.

Point-to-multipoint developments were a hot topic in our engagements with service providers and component suppliers. It was also evident in the attendance and excitement at the Open XR Forum Symposium, as well as the vendor demos.

We’re seeing that QSFP-DD ZR+ is a book-ended solution for carriers; interoperability requirements are centred on the CFEC (concatenated or cascaded FEC) market; oFEC (Open FEC) is not being deployed.

Management of pluggables in the optical layer is critical to their network deployment, while network efficiency and power reduction are top of mind.

The definition of ZR and ZR+ needs to be subdivided further into ZR - CFEC, ZR+ - oFEC, and ZR+-HP (high performance), which is a book-ended solution.

Dave Welch was a plenary speaker at ECOC 2022. His talk was entitled: Scenarios of Future Innovations in the Network.

Scott T. Wilkinson, Lead Analyst, Optical Components, Cignal AI.

The show was invaluable, given this was our first ECOC since Cignal AI launched its optical components coverage.

Coherent optics announcements from the show did not follow the usual bigger-faster-stronger pattern, as the success of 400ZR has convinced operators and vendors to look at coherent at the edge and inside the data centre.

100ZR for access, the upcoming 800ZR specifications from the OIF, and coherent LR (coherent designed for 2km-10km) will revolutionise how coherent optics are used in networks.

Alongside the coherent announcements were developments from the direct-detect vendors demonstrating or previewing key technologies for 800 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 1.6 Terabit Ethernet (TbE) modules.

800GbE is nearly ready for prime time, awaiting completion of systems based on the newest 112 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) serialiser-deserialiser (serdes) switches. The technology for 224Gbps serdes is just starting to emerge and looks promising for products in late 2024 or 2025.

While there were no unexpected developments at the show, it was great to compare developments across the industry and understand the impact of supply chain issues, operator deployment plans, and any hints of oversupply.

We came away optimistic about continued growth in optical components shipments and revenue into 2023.

Seb Savory, Professor of Optical Fibre Communication, University of Cambridge

My overwhelming sense from ECOC was it was great to be meeting in person again. I must confess I was looking at logistics as much as content with a view to ECOC 2023 in Glasgow where I will be a technical programme committee chair.

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director of the Optical and Quantum Communications Laboratory at Huawei

In the last 12 months, the industry has got more technical clarification regarding next-generation 800ZR and 800LR coherent pluggables.

While 800ZR’s use case seems to be definitely in the ZR+ regime, including 400 gigabit covering metro and long-haul, the case for 800LR is less clear.

Some proponents argue that this is a building block toward 1.6TbE and the path of coherence inside the data centre.

Although intensity-modulation direct detection (IMDD) faces technical barriers to scaling wavelength division multiplexing to 8x200 gigabit, the technological options for beyond 800-gigabit coherent aren’t converging either.

In the mix are 4x400 gigabit, 2x800 gigabit and 1x1.6 terabit, making the question of how low-cost and low-power coherent can scale into data centre applications one of the most interesting technical challenges for the coming years.

Arista continues making a case for a pluggable roadmap through the decade based on 200-gigabit serdes.

With module power envelopes of around 40W at the faceplate, it shows the challenge that the industry is facing and the case co-packaged optics is trying to make.

However, putting all the power into, or next to, the switching chip doesn’t make the cooling problem any less problematic. Here, I wonder if Avicena’s microLED technology could benefit next-generation chip-to-chip or die-to-die interconnects by dropping the high-speed serdes altogether and thus avoiding the huge overhead current input-output (I/O) is placing on data centre networking.

It was great to see the demo of the 200-gigabit PAM-4 externally modulated laser (EML) at Coherent’s booth delivering high-quality eye diagrams. The technology is getting more mature, and next year will receive much exposure in the broader ecosystem.

As for every conference, we have seen the usual presentations on Infinera’s XR Optics. Point-to-multipoint coherent is a great technology looking for a use case, but it is several years too early.

At ECOC’s Market Focus, Dave Welch put up a slide on the XR ecosystem, showing several end users, several system OEMs and a single component vendor - Infinera. I think one can leave it at this for now without further comment.