OFC: After the aliens, a decade to rewire the Earth

At the OFC 2025 Rump Session, held in San Francisco, three teams were set a weighty challenge. If a catastrophic event—a visit by aliens —caused the destruction of the global telecommunications network, how would each team’s ‘superheroes’ go about designing the replacement network? What technologies would they use? And what issues must be considered?

 Source: Team A

The Rump Session tackled a provocative thought experiment. If the Earth's entire communication infrastructure vanished overnight, how would the teams go about rebuilding it?

Twelve experts - eleven from industry and one academic - were split into three teams.

The teams were given ten years to build their vision network. A decade was chosen as it is a pragmatic timescale and would allow the teams to consider using emerging technologies.

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Webinar: Scaling AI clusters with optical interconnects

A reminder that this Thursday, September 14th, 8:00-9:00 am PT, I will be taking part in a webcast as part of the OCP Educational Webinar Programme that explores the future of AI computing with optical interconnects.

Data and computation drive AI success, and the hyperscaler are racing to build massive AI accelerator-based compute clusters. The impact of large language models and ChatGPT has turbocharged this race. Scaling demands innovation in accelerator chips, node linkages, fabrics, and topology.

For this webinar, industry experts will discuss the challenge of scaling AI clusters. The other speakers include Cliff Grossner Ph.D., Yang Chen, and Bob Shine. To register, please click here 

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Silicon Photonics: Fueling the Next Information Revolution

New book to be published in December 2016

Silicon Photonics: Fueling the Next Information Revolution is the title of the book Daryl Inniss and I have just completed.

We started writing the book at the end of 2014. We felt the timing was right for a silicon photonics synthesis book that assesses the significant changes taking place in the datacom, telecom, and semiconductor industries, and explains the market opportunities that will result and the role silicon photonics will play.

Silicon photonics is coming to market at a time of momentous change. Internet content providers are driving new requirements as they scale their data centres. The chip industry is grappling with the end of Moore’s law. And the telecom community faces its own challenges as the bandwidth-carrying capacity of fiber starts to be approached.

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Verizon's move to become a digital service provider

Verizon’s next-generation network based on network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) is rapidly taking shape.

Working with Dell, Big Switch Networks and Red Hat, the US telco announced in April it had already brought online five data centres. Since then it has deployed more sites but is not saying how many.

Source: Verizon

“We are laying the foundation of the programmable infrastructure that will allow us to do all the automation, virtualisation and the software-defining we want to do on top of that,” says Chris Emmons, director, network infrastructure planning at Verizon.

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FPGAs with 56-gigabit transceivers set for 2017

Xilinx is expected to ship its first FPGAs featuring 56-gigabit transceivers next year. 

The company demonstrated a 56-gigabit transceiver using 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) at the recent OFC show. The 56-gigabit transceiver, also referred to as a serialiser-deserialiser (serdes), was shown successfully working over backplane specified for 25-gigabit signalling only.

Gilles GarciaXilinx's 56-gigabit serdes is implemented using a 16nm CMOS process node but the first FPGAs featuring the design will be made using a 7nm process. Gilles Garcia says the choice of 7nm CMOS is solely a business decision and not a technical one.

”Optical module [makers] will take another year to make something decent using PAM-4," says Garcia, Xilinx's director marketing and business development, wired communications. "Our 7nm FPGAs will follow very soon afterwards.”

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COBO looks inside and beyond the data centre

The Consortium of On-Board Optics is working on 400 gigabit optics for the data centre and also for longer-distance links. COBO is a Microsoft-led initiative tasked with standardising a form factor for embedded optics.

Established in March 2015, the consortium already has over 50 members and expects to have early specifications next year and first hardware by late 2017.

Brad Booth

Brad Booth, the chair of COBO and principal architect for Microsoft’s Azure Global Networking Services, says Microsoft plans to deploy 100 gigabit in its data centres next year and that when the company started looking at 400 gigabit, it became concerned about the size of the proposed pluggable modules, and the interface speeds needed between the switch silicon and the pluggable module.

“What jumped out at us is that we might be running into an issue here,” says Booth.

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Reporting the optical component & module industry

LightCounting recently published its six-monthly optical market research covering telecom and datacom. Gazettabyte interviewed Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of LightCounting, about the findings.

When people forecast they always make a mistake on the timeline because they overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term and underestimate in the long term.

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