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.

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Ciena's multi-format 400G coherent QSFP-DD pluggable

Ciena showcased a working 400-gigabit Universal coherent pluggable module at the ECOC 2022 conference and exhibition in Basel, Switzerland.

Ciena is using its WaveLogic 5 Nano coherent digital signal processor (DSP) for the Universal QSFP-DD coherent pluggable module.

"We call it universal because it supports many transmission modes - interoperable and high performance; the most in the industry," says Helen Xenos, senior director of portfolio marketing at Ciena. 

A look inside Ciena's 400-gigabit Universal coherent pluggable module. TOF is the tunable optical filter. Source: Ciena

The pluggable has custom extended-performance modes and supports three industry formats: the 400ZR interoperable standard, the 400ZR+ multi-source agreement (MSA), and the OpenROADM MSA. (See tables below).

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Tencent makes its co-packaged optics move

• Tencent is the first hyperscaler to announce it is deploying a co-packaged optics switch chip

• Tencent will use Broadcom’s Humboldt that combines its 25.6-terabit Tomahawk 4 switch chip with four optical engines, each 3.2 terabit-per-second (Tbps)

Part 2: Broadcom's co-packaged optics 

Tencent will use Broadcom’s Tomahawk 4 switch chip co-packaged with optics for its data centres.

Manish Mehta

“We are now partnered with the hyperscaler to deploy this in a network,” says Manish Mehta, vice president of marketing and operations optical systems division, Broadcom. “This is a huge step for co-packaged optics overall.”

The Chinese hyperscaler will use Broadcom’s 25.6Tbps Tomahawk 4 Humboldt, a hybrid design where half of the chip’s input-output (I/O) is optical and half is the chip’s serialisers-deserialisers (serdes) that connect to pluggable modules on the switch’s front panel.

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The significance of 6G

Henning Schulzrinne is known for speaking his mind.

A professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, he previously expressed concern regarding what he saw as excessive hype surrounding 5G.

More recently, he has written about 6G, placing the emerging wireless standard in the broader context of societal needs.

"Research, particularly academic research, should be driven by the urgent needs of society, not just supplying patent-protected 'moats' against the competition, whether between companies or nations," he wrote in an introduction to the book, Shaping Future 6G Networks.

Schulzrinne stresses he is not working on 6G standards but has taken part in an early 6G flagship project at the University of Oulu, Finland.

"My expertise is not on the radio; it is system architecture," he says. "We have a lot of interest in my research group on issues such as automation and authentication, not specifically to 6G but to networks."

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A career in technology market analysis

John Lively reflects on a 30-year career.

It was a typical workday in 1989, sitting through a meeting announcing the restructuring of Corning's planar coupler business.

The speaker's final words were, "Lively, you'll be doing forecasting." It changed my life and set my career path for the next 30-plus years.

John Lively, principal analyst at market research firm, LightCounting.

No one grows up with a desire to be a market analyst. Indeed, I didn't ask for the job. What made it possible was an IBM PC and LOTUS 1-2-3 in my marine biology lab in the early 1980s (a story for another time).

After a stop at MIT for an MBA, this led to a job in Corning's fledgling PC support team in 1985. Then it was Corning's optical fibre business cost-modelling fibre-to-the-home networks on a PC, working with Bellcore and General Instrument engineers. From there, it was to forecast market demand for planar couplers in the FTTH market.

In the following decade, I had various market forecasting roles within Corning's optical fibre and photonics businesses.

Each time I tried to put forecasting behind me by taking a marketing or product management job, management said they needed me to return to forecasting due to some crisis or another (thank you, Bernie Ebbers).

In 1999, I had an epiphany. If Corning thinks I'm better at forecasting than anything else, perhaps I should become a professional forecaster in a company whose product is forecasts.

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Broadcom samples the first 51.2-terabit switch chip

• Broadcom's Tomahawk 5 marks the era of the 51.2-terabit switch chip
• The 5nm CMOS device consumes less than 500W
• The Tomahawk 5 uses 512, 100-gigabit PAM-4 (4-level pulse amplitude modulation) serdes (serialisers-deserialisers)
• Broadcom will offer a co-packaged version combining the chip with eight 6.4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) optical engines

Part 1: Broadcom's Tomahawk 5

Broadcom is sampling the world's first 51.2-terabit switch chip.

With the Tomahawk 5, Broadcom continues to double switch silicon capacity every 24 months; Broadcom launched the first 3.2-terabit Tomahawk was launched in September 2014.

"Broadcom is once again first to market at 51.2Tbps," says Bob Wheeler, principal analyst at Wheeler's Network. "It continues to execute, while competitors have struggled to deliver multiple generations in a timely manner."

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ADCs key for high baud-rate coherent systems

Increasing the baud rate of coherent modems benefits optical transport. The higher the baud rate the more data can be sent on a wavelength, reducing the cost-per-bit of traffic.

But engineers have become so good at designing coherent systems that they are now approaching the Shannon limit. 

Tomislav Drenski

At the OFC show earlier this year, Ciena showcased a coherent module operating at 107 gigabaud (GBd). And last year, Acacia, now part of Cisco, announced its next-generation 1.2 terabits-per-second (Tbps) wavelength coherent module operating at up to 140GBd. 

The industry believes that increasing the baud rate to 240+GBd is possible, but each new symbol-rate hike is challenging.

All the components in a modem - the coherent DSP and its digital-to-analogue (DAC) and analogue-to-digital (ADC) converters, the optics, and the analogue drive circuitry - must scale in lockstep.

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