The entire optical communication is accelerating its upgrade

2024-10-25

This year's OFC(OFC-2024) will be held from March 24-28, 2024 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California, USA. The OFC brought together more than 700 exhibitors, launched more than 850 technical seminars, and tens of thousands of professionals from 65 countries participated.

Major cloud vendors and switch vendors are generally optimistic about future computing power needs, believing that the demand for optical devices required for AI clusters will accelerate upgrade iterations. According to OpenAI's scaling laws, growth in model size, data set size, and the number of floating points required for training will drive model performance, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. In order to meet the needs of AI clusters and solve the cost and power challenges, many companies and research institutions demonstrated their cutting-edge products and latest solutions in the field of optical communication at OFC-2024. The main focus is on the support for high-speed optical communication solutions such as 800G and 1.6T, the innovation of optical connection solutions, and the many technical paths laid out by various manufacturers under the need to reduce cost and consumption.

the whole optical communication industry chain is accelerated.

Product aspect

1.6T high-speed optical modules, 200G optical chips, and OCSICPO switches have become hot spots. With the expansion of model and data set size, model performance improves. Training large models requires a lot of computing power, resulting in increased demand for optical devices. According to the North American Market Company, the share of optical devices in data center capital spending continues to rise and is expected to reach 5.3% in 2025. The accelerated role of AI shortens the iterative cycle of optical devices, and the industry hopes that optical communication can provide higher data transmission rates and lower delay support, in order to better support the operation of large-scale AI clusters. High-speed optical communication solutions such as 800G and 1.6T have therefore become a hot spot in the development of the industry.

At the exhibition, many chip and optical module manufacturers' products were displayed, including 200G EML, 50 milliwatt laser, etc., all for AIML scenarios. Manufacturers indicate capacity ramp up to meet downstream optical module demand. The arrival of AI has accelerated the optical module iteration cycle, and 1.6T optical modules are expected to start in the second half of this year, becoming the preferred solution for the next generation of single-wave 200G needs. In addition, pluggable optical modules will continue to be preferred in the future due to their high reliability and scalability.

Silicon optical modules are also a focus of the exhibition, silicon optical modules and related chips frequently appeared. Domestic and foreign manufacturers demonstrated different specifications of silicon optical modules and modulator chips. Silicon optical technology has been gradually improved in pluggable optical modules, especially in high-power modules. In addition, CPU and LPO schemes are also hot topics at the conference, although there are still challenges in the standard unification and interconnection of LPO, but it shows the advantages of lower power consumption and cost in specific scenarios. However, the application scenario of LPO is more limited, and it is forecast to account for about 10% of the 800G market.

All-optical switches appear gradually, and the trend of optical input is obvious. The OCS all-optical switch released by Google last year is mainly used in the internal interconnection of data centers to accelerate the penetration of optical systems into the space. This year Coherent and Photonics both demonstrated OCS switches, which use mams technology to avoid the photoelectric signal conversion process and have the characteristics of high precision, low loss and low power. The difference is that Coherent high Yi uses WSS technology 300x300 ports; The light fast technology uses MEMS technology 400x400 port, which technology is better, the market is still in the game. In addition, as a support for high-end devices, Sanshi Park's miniaturized optical switches and circulators can be perfectly adapted to the OCS all-optical switching system.

Optical connection

The application prospect of optical interconnection in the data center equipment is constantly amplified, in addition to the interconnection between devices, light is also penetrated into the interconnection scenario between boards, chips and devices. Optical bandwidth and delay advantages are obvious, can solve the limitations of copper, the trend is to use optical data transmission and connection, including all-optical switches and optical modules. Thin film lithium nitrate modulator chips and 800G coherence schemes are also hot spots. There is still a lot of room for development of optical interconnection, which can solve the bandwidth bottleneck and open the application space of optical interconnection.

The application of optical IO technology inside the data center, including its advantages and opportunities. Optical IO can improve bandwidth energy consumption and delay, solving the limitations of traditional copper cable interconnection. Silicon optical technology has become an important solution in the future, enabling the integration of computing chips and optical chips. The optical interconnection solution enables higher data transmission throughput, improves GPU communication efficiency, and reduces power consumption and cost.

In HBM connections, power consumption issues can be solved with LPO (Laser Optimization) solutions. At the exhibition, Asectron showed one LPO OSFP of PCIE Generation 6, although it is still in the early product form, but its potential application scenarios - the trend of optical connectivity between boards, chips and devices is expanding. This is because copper has obvious limitations in terms of transmission distance and bandwidth, and the advantage of light is that the bandwidth and delay are significantly better than copper.

Reduce costs and consumption

In the field of optical communication, reducing cost and power consumption has always been the goal pursued by the industry. At OFC2024, manufacturers demonstrated their latest progress in this field, including the application of new materials, the improvement of manufacturing processes and the optimization of system design.

Xinyi Sheng, Cambridge, Amphenol, Haiguang Xinchuang, Taiwan Chuang Optoelectronics, etc., have demonstrated submerged liquid cooled light modules. Although the cost of the immersed liquid cooled optical module program is still high, with the promotion of the high-speed optical interconnection program, heat dissipation has become the biggest pain point for switch and data center manufacturers, and the heat dissipation efficiency of the immersed program is the highest, I believe that as more and more enterprises develop liquid cooling related products, the cost is expected to be further optimized.

Other

The issue of coherent systems was also highlighted at the OFC conference, with discussions around extending the range beyond the C-band and L-band, as well as Fujitsu and Ciena's water-cooled coherent modules and optical transmission systems. In the long run, the advantages of air-core fiber are also mentioned. Other developments reported at the OFC include Broadcom and Coherence's 200G VCsels, quantum dot lasers, passive optical networks, optical switching, and Google's announcement on how artificial intelligence can be used to develop new optical components.

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