JOHN WILLIAMSON CO-PACKAGED OPTICS
Close Component Encounters of the Preferred Kind? CO-PACKAGED OPTICS:
The requirements for CPO are well versed. Traditional I/O architectures are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the demand by various networking applications for greater and greater compute, storage and data movement resources and efficiencies at lower power consumption levels. This is especially true for Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning (AI/ML) applications, writes John Williamson .
W hile there’s Packaged Optics (CPO) market, there’s some consensus that the business is going to get bigger. For example, the Communications Industry Researchers (CIR) Inc analyst firm predicts that the CPO modules market will reach $5.5 billion in 2027, including Near Packaged Optics (NPO) products. CIR also sees data centres generating $19-plus billion revenues of aggregate spending on CPO over the 2023 to 2028 period. “As data rates increase using the industry’s current architectures, the portion of total power used in networking climbs rapidly,”. “This will especially be a problem as data rates approach 200G and as we see the addition of ‘backend’ networks to support AI/ML clusters.” presently some variance in the estimated size of the current and future Co- CPO TO THE RESCUE? In-packaged optics are intended to address the looming and foreseeable performance shortfalls and bottlenecks of conventional electrical I/Os. Here, the Co-packaged Optics for Datacenter 2023 report from Yole Intelligence estimates that, when in-package optical I/O technology is coupled with
Pancholy, Director, Hyperscale Strategy & Products, at Broadcom Inc’s Optical Systems Division. But getting to grips with specific CPO metrics may not be straightforward. “We have shared some power numbers publicly in the past, but the industry is just using those as competitive targets,” remarks Pancholy. “We share specific numbers with customers and prospects under NDA.” MOMENTUM BUILDING There have been a number of positive developments advancing the CPO cause in recent months. New would-be players have appeared, various different and advanced demoes have been mounted and, as noted by CIR, China has set up its own CPO development organisation and work on standards setting is beginning in that country. At the same time, the proposed remit of CPO is enlarging. CIR President Lawrence Gasman identifies a number of sector trends. “One is the broadening beyond how CPO has usually been thought of,” he says. “Towards new applications, for example, sensors being the obvious one. The other trend is the hint that somehow a new silicon photonics is about to appear in which CPO will figure as an application, or something like that.” What is seen as a seminal event was the announcement in April by the
packaging innovations such as chiplets and silicon photonics, solutions can provide up to 1,000 times the bandwidth at one tenth the power of electrical I/O. 1 PIC: But on the reduced power and latency fronts, as well as CPO, there is now interest in Linear-drive Pluggable Optics (LPO). “There is a potential alternative to co-packaged optics in the form of LPOs remaining at the front panel of the switch,” remarks Martin Vallo, Ph.D., Senior Analyst within the Photonics and Sensing Division at Yole Intelligence, part of Yole Group. “LPOs are designed without DSPs or CDRs, resulting in significantly lower power consumption and reduced latency than conventional DSP-based solutions.” In addition, says Vallo, reducing latency is a crucial improvement in applications such as switch-to-switch, switch-to-server, and GPU-to- GPU connectivity in ML and High- Performance Computing (HPC). “LPOs are going to be available for both multi- mode and single-mode applications,” he predicts. Broadcom believes CPO is a better option, and says that, at the 100G/ lane, its CPO provides the lowest power, and at 200G/lane, this becomes even lower. “This is a power level that DSP-based pluggables and linear pluggables cannot reach,” states Rajiv
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| ISSUE 34 | Q3 2023
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