ECOC 2023 industry reflections - Part 2

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent ECOC show in Glasgow. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are more responses from LightCounting, Hyper Photonix, NewPhotonics, and Broadcom.

Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of LightCounting, a market research company

Demand for optical connectivity in data centres has accelerated innovation in the industry. ECOC 2023 offered numerous start-ups and established vendors another opportunity to disclose their latest achievements.

The improved reliability of quantum dot lasers was a pleasant surprise. Alfalume presented the latest quantum dot comb laser developments, including continuous power up to 250 mW with a power conversion efficiency of a quarter (25%) and efficient operation of up to 100oC. Preliminary test data suggests that quantum dot lasers offer superior reliability compared to their quantum well counterparts. It would be great to have a reliable laser source, finally.

Cisco and Intel deserve much credit for bringing silicon photonics-based transceivers to the market, but numerous vendors are entering the race now.

All the leading foundries offer photonic integrated circuits with integrated laser chips. TSMC disclosed its plans to use a 7nm CMOS process to manufacture photonic chips. Recently formed OpenLight offers fully tested photonic integrated circuit designs, which can be produced at several foundries, including Tower Semiconductor.

Many transceiver suppliers have internally designed optical engines. They all plan to reduce the manufacturing cost of silicon photonics-based transceivers, fulfilling the potential of CMOS technology. Competition among suppliers enabled huge reductions in the cost of CMOS-based ICs. Let us see if this works for CMOS-based photonic integrated circuits.

Brad Booth, director of technology and strategy at Hyper Photonix, and a consultant 

There was good attendance at ECOC considering some companies continue to limit travel. Linear drive pluggable optics (LPO) is gaining traction but still has hurdles to address. Meanwhile, the 800-gigabit train is pulling into the station with a ZR digital signal processor and client-side modules.

What surprised me at the show? The shift to start-ups. It is reminiscent of the Gigabit Ethernet days.

Yaniv BenHaim, founder & CEO of NewPhotonics

There were some notable trends at ECOC. One is that 800-gigabit optical transceivers are ramping. At least three vendors were giving private demos of 8x100-gigabit DR enabled with the coming availability of 200G EMLs and photodetectors.

The industry is also optimistic about linear drive pluggable optics (LPO), helped by the buzz created by Nvidia, saying it will make the technology available in AI clusters by year-end. Data centres and networking companies are also pushing LPO and evaluating it and will likely announce findings by OFC 2024.

Another upcoming technology, like optical processing, as demonstrated by our company, NewPhotonics, can further advance power savings and range with both traditional optical modules and LPOs. At ECOC, we showed 224 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) optical input-output driving more than 10km of fibre using Intel's new 224Gbps serialiser-deserialiser (serdes). We also showed NewPhotonics' optical serdes multiplexing and demultiplexing multiple optical 112Gbps PAM-4 in the optical time domain.

Companies providing coherent technology continue to promote using coherent transceivers in the data centre. We don't see any reason to do so when PAM-4 non-coherent solutions can cater for data centre needs and also go beyond 10km.

The market is moving forward in using 224 gigabits, which will disrupt optical transceivers and the active optical cable markets. It seems co-packaged optics will be delayed further as the electrical solutions for 50-terabit and 100-terabit switches are already there using electrical serdes.

The optical communication market had no new surprises based on wavelength division multiplexing PAM-4 and 16-QAM. Some ideas exist for replacing the DSP functions with analogue implementations. NewPhotonics is the only company pushing for an all-optical solution instead of an analogue or a digital signal processor solution.

Rajiv Pancholy, director of hyperscale strategy & products, optical systems division at Broadcom

It was evident at ECOC 2023 that the emergence of large networking clusters enabling the connectivity of graphics processing units (GPUs) for recommendation engines and large language models has substantially increased the ratio of photonic to copper links inside data centres. The optics industry has been waiting for an all-to-all connectivity killer app to increase volumes and therefore investment, and that app might have arrived.

Companies demonstrated excellent progress on 200 gigabit per lane optical components. Several companies are sampling 200 gigabit EMLs and plan production in 2024. Several companies also announced plans to release 200 gigabit per lane VCSELs. There was some early demonstration of 200 gigabit per lane silicon photonics, but it is still being determined when the technology will be ready for production.

Lastly, start-ups at the show focused on delivering novel optical interconnect technologies with micro-LEDs, comb lasers, and advanced packaging that reinforces a general trend towards high-density photonic integrated circuits, electrical interconnect simplification, and co-packaging. Though it's still being determined when these optical technologies will come to market, Broadcom is not the only company working on co-packaged optics. We believe you will need co-packaged optics much sooner than five years from now.