INDUSTRY NEWS
AI drives 800Gbe module growth
Datacom optical component revenue grew for the fourth straight quarter with the explosion of demand for optics used in AI clusters, according to the 4Q23 Optical Components Report from
speed Datacom optical component market is forecast to exceed US$10 billion by 2025. Coherent port shipments increased QoQ, but they were down slightly YoY. 400ZR/ZR+ shipments grew 25% QoQ, and coherent port shipments increased QoQ, but they were down slightly YoY. 400ZR/ZR+ shipments grew 25% QoQ. The report also notes that datacom revenue reached record levels, up 11% YoY, and module shipments grew rapidly in the last two quarters of 2023 as AI demand
accelerated. For all of 2023 however, total Datacom revenue fell by 4%, weighed down by poor performance at the start of the year, but after a sharp drop at the start of 2023, 400GbE port shipments recovered and grew over 50% YoY in 4Q23. Cignal AI also found that Huawei, Infinera, Acacia, and Nokia shipped Gen120P 1.2T high speed coherent ports for revenue in 4Q23, which is the first quarter of production shipments for this new technology. The company also forecast
an increase of 8% for 800GbE modules based on accelerating demand, and initial forecasts of 1600ZR modules were also added to the Optical Components report this quarter. “Datacom shipments, especially 800GbE optics, are ramping up fast and shipped units are forecast to reach eight million in 2024,” said Scott Wilkinson, lead analyst for Optical Components at Cignal AI. “Telecom is slowly recovering from a bottom in Q3, but no immediate reversal is in sight.”
research firm Cignal AI. Nvidia, Coherent, and Innolight lead in
800GbE Datacom module shipments for hyperscale AI applications. Acacia and Marvell lead in shipments of high- performance coherent interfaces based on large volumes of 400ZR pluggables. The high-
PRL, iPronics design ‘revolutionary’ telecoms chip
A team from the Photonics Research Lab (PRL) at the ITEAM in the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), together with the company iPronics, has designed and manufactured a revolutionary chip for the telecommunications sector, data centres, and infrastructure associated with artificial intelligence computing systems. The groups say the chip is the world’s first universal, programmable,
for communications, data centres, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, satellites, drones, or autonomous driving, among many other applications. The chip allows on- demand programming and interconnection of wireless and photonic segments of communication networks, avoiding the generation of bottlenecks that can limit both capacity and available bandwidth. This chip is already integrated into an iPronics product, the Smartlight, and is already being used by
Vodafone in testing phase.
efficient management of data flows in data centres and networks of artificial intelligence computing systems. Our next goal is to scale the chip to meet the needs of this market segment,” highlights Daniel Pérez-López, co-founder and CTO of iPronics. “It is the first chip in the world with these characteristics. It can implement the twelve basic functionalities needed in these systems and be programmed on demand, resulting in greater circuit efficiency,” says Capmany.
The development of the chip is the main result of the European project UMWP-Chip, led by researcher José Capmany and funded with an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The work has been published in the journal Nature Communications. “For us, the development of this chip represents a very important step because it has allowed the validation of our developments applied to a growing problem, the
and multifunctional photonic chip, and it is particularly useful
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| ISSUE 37 | Q2 2024
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