The APC’s blueprint for silicon photonics

The Advanced Photonics Coalition (APC) wants to smooth the path for silicon photonics to become a high-volume manufacturing technology.

Jeffery Maki

The organisation is talking to companies to tackle issues whose solutions will benefit the photonics technology.

The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to act as an industry catalyst to prove technologies and reduce the risk associated with their development, says Jeffery Maki, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks and a member of the Advanced Photonics Coalition's board.

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The market opportunity for linear drive optics

A key theme at OFC earlier this year that surprised many was linear drive optics. Its attention at the optical communications and networking event was intriguing because linear drive - based on using remote silicon to drive photonics - is not new.

Scott Wilkinson

"I spoke to one company that had a [linear drive] demo on the show floor," says Scott Wilkinson, lead analyst for networking components at Cignal AI. "They had been working on the technology for four years and were taken aback; they weren't expecting people to come by and ask about it. "

The cause of the buzz? Andy Bechtolsheim, famed investor, co-founder and chief development officer of network switching firm Arista Networks and, before that, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

"Andy came out and said this is a big deal, and that got many people talking about it," says Wilkinson, author of a recent linear drive market research report.

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Marvell’s CTO: peering into the future is getting harder

CTO interviews part 4: Noam Mizrahi

In a wide-ranging interview, Noam Mizrahi (pictured), executive vice president and corporate chief technology officer (CTO) at Marvell, discusses the many technologies needed to succeed in the data centre. He also discusses a CTO’s role and the importance of his focussed thinking ritual.

Noam Mizrahi has found his calling.

“I’m inspired by technology,” he says. “Every time I see an elegant technical solution - and it can be very simple - it makes me smile.”

Marvell hosts an innovation contest, and at one event, Mizrahi mentioned this to participants. “So they issued stickers saying, ‘I made Noam smile’,” he says.

Marvell’s broad portfolio of products spans high-end processors, automotive Ethernet, storage, and optical modules.

“This technology richness means that every day I come to work, I feel I learn something new,” he says.

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Teramount brings pluggability to co-packaged optics

Hesham Taha, the CEO and co-founder of Teramount, describes the last two years for his company as eventful.

"Many things have happened on many fronts," he says.

Teramount has developed a fibre assembly technology for designs integrating photonics and chips.

Hesham Taha

The start-up has raised $20 million in funding and has 30 staff. In addition, the company is recruiting staff experienced in manufacturing processes.

"The funding helps to support what we are working on today, which is manufacturing readiness," says Taha.

Taha also notes marketplace changes as when the rising interest in co-packaged caused some companies that had stepped out of silicon photonics to return.

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Drut's agile optical fabric for the data centre

A US start-up has developed a photonic fabric for the data centre that pulls together the hardware needed for a computational task.

Drut Technologies offers management software and a custom line card, which, when coupled with the optical switch, grabs the hardware required for the workload.

Some of the Drut team (L to R): Sumit Jayaswal, member of technical staff; Bill Koss, CEO; and Jitender Miglani, founder and president.

“You can have a server with lots of resource machines: lots of graphic processing units (GPUs) and lots of memory,” says Bill Koss, CEO of Drut. “You create a machine, attach a workload to it and run it; forever, for a day, or 15 minutes.”

Drut first showcased its technology supporting the PCI Express (PCIe) bus over photonics at server specialist, SuperMicro’s exhibition stand, at the Supercomputing 22 show held last November in Dallas, Texas.

“This is a fully reconfigurable, direct-connect optical fabric for the data centre,” says Koss.

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Data centre photonics - an ECOC report

• ECOC 2022 included talks on optical switching and co-packaged optics.
• Speakers discussed optical switching trends and Google's revelation that it has been using optical circuit switching in its data centres.
• Nvidia discussed its latest chips, how they are used to build high-performance computing systems, and why optical input-output will play a critical role.

Co-packaged optics and optical switching within the data centre were prominent topics at the recent ECOC 2022 conference and exhibition in Basel, Switzerland.

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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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