The compound complexity of co-packaged optics

Part 1: The OIF’s co-packaging initiative

Large-scale data centres consume huge amounts of power; one building on a data centre campus can consume 100MW. But there is a limit as to the overall power that can be supplied.

Jeff Hutchins

The challenge facing data centre operators is that networking, used to link the equipment inside the data centre, continues to consume more and more power.

That means less power remains for the servers; the compute that does the revenue-generating work.

This is forcing a rethink regarding networking and explains the growing interest in co-packaged optics, a technique that effectively adds optical input-output (I/O) to a chip.

Two industry organisations - the OIF and The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) - have each started work to identify the requirements needed for co-packaged optics adoption.

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100-gigabaud optics usher in the era of terabit transmissions

•  NeoPhotonics has unveiled a coherent modulator and receiver that operate at over 100 gigabaud.

Telecom operators are in a continual battle to improve the economics of their optical transport networks to keep pace with the relentless growth of IP traffic.

One approach is to increase the symbol rate used for optical transmission. By operating at a higher baud rate, more data can be carried on an optical wavelength.

Ferris Lipscomb

Alternatively, a higher baud rate allows a simpler modulation scheme to be used, sending the same amount of data over greater distances. That is because the fewer constellation points of the simpler modulation scheme help data recovery at the receiver.

NeoPhotonics has detailed two optical components - a coherent driver-modulator and an intradyne coherent receiver (micro-ICR) - that operate at over 100 gigabaud (GBd). The symbol rate suits 800-gigabit systems and can enable one-terabit transmissions.

NeoPhotonics’ coherent devices were announced to coincide with the ECOC 2020 show.

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Ayar Labs’ TeraPhy chiplet nears volume production

Moving data between processing nodes - whether servers in a data centre or specialised computing nodes used for supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) - is becoming a performance bottleneck.

Workloads continue to grow yet networking isn’t keeping pace with processing hardware, resulting in the inefficient use of costly hardware.

Networking also accounts for an increasing proportion of the overall power consumed by such computing systems.

These trends explain the increasing interest in placing optics alongside chips and co-packaging the two to boost input-output (I/O) capacity and reach.

At the ECOC 2020 exhibition and conference held virtually, start-up Ayar Labs showcased its first working TeraPHY, an optical I/O chiplet, manufactured using GlobalFoundries’ 45nm silicon-photonics process.

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Books 2020: Part II

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part II, Maxim Kuschnerov, Professor Roel Baets and Yves LeMaître share their favourites.

 

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director of the Optical & Quantum Communications Laboratory, Huawei

Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Physic is Different by Philip Ball is one of my favourite books about physics. It offers an intuitive and math-free view on the beauty of quantum mechanics, which, in its approach, is almost philosophical.

As the author states, one of the problems that people have with the inherent unpredictability of quantum effects is the lack of analogies from real life that would make quantum phenomena relatable.

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Books in 2020

Each year Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. Industry analysts and regular contributors Dana Cooperson and Andrew Schmitt kick off this year's highlighted books.

Dana Cooperson, independent analyst

I had difficulty concentrating enough to read during the lockdown despite having more time. Eventually, events spurred my overdue fiction/ non-fiction exploration of the underpinnings of systemic racism as well as some escapism through journeys that the pandemic made impossible.

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Broadcom’s 14.4-terabit Jericho2c+ router chip

The inexorable growth of IP traffic is being driven by ever more powerful devices being connected to the network and greater numbers of machines talking to each other.

In turn, Covid-19 has contributed its own traffic spike: AT&T reported that in September its core network traffic was 20 per cent up compared to March’s figures.

Jericho2c+ architecture. Source: Broadcom

The growth means that each new generation of router platform must at least double the traffic throughput while keeping the power consumption fixed.

This is a considerable challenge but one that the router chip designers continue to meet.

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AI: “It is an astonishing time to be a technologist.”

Want to master artificial intelligence (AI) techniques? A new book, The Supervised Learning Workshop, teaches you how to create machine-learning models using the Python programming language. A conversation with the co-author, Blaine Bateman.

Blaine Bateman is a business strategy consultant, helping companies identify growth strategies and opportunities.

Several years ago he decided to focus on data analysis or, more accurately, predictive analytics using machine learning.

“I started to see that clients had lots of data, frequently they didn’t know anything about it and they weren’t using it,” he says. “At the same time, I started to see that AI and machine learning were really on the uptick.”

Machine learning work is also rewarding, he says: “You build stuff and when you get it to work, you do something that helps someone.”

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