Over the past few years, there has been growing interest in a technology called Co-Packaged Optics, SDxCentral reported. It is reported that this technology provides higher power than traditional pluggable systems, while achieving cost savings.
And according to Kevin Deierling, Nvidia's senior vice president of networking, while the first co-package optical switches are expected to launch later this year, and chipmakers are investing billions of dollars to advance silicon-optical technology, don't expect them to be competitive soon.
Kevin Deierling said engineers have had amazing success in delaying the commercialization of CPOs indefinitely. "I think the first time I heard about ACPOs, I said that when each link reaches 25Gb/s, we have to use on-board optical devices. Then 50Gb/s, then 112Gb/s. ”
Recently, Kevin Deierling's team unveiled a 51.2Tb/s switch platform with a footprint of 1U or 2U, using a 112Gb/s serializer/deserializer, offering up to 64 800Gb/s ports or 128 400Gb/s ports.
"Somehow, all the different disciplines will continue to make the traditional scheme work." Kevin Deierling doesn't think that will change, at least not in the near future. "We can do a lot of very interesting work with chip connections without having to resort to esoteric on-board optical devices."
CPO is still the trend
Kevin Deierling isn't saying CPO has no future, though. Eventually, he said, engineers will reach a point where on-board optical devices can no longer be avoided. "The question is when, frankly, in the short term, we don't see the point in time and reason why the traditional switching system will be replaced."
The main issues that CPO promises to address are not port performance, but power consumption, heat dissipation, and, by extension, port density. Dell'Oro Group analyst Sameh Boujelbene told SDxCentral: "The problems we're trying to solve with CPO technology are power consumption and density... That is, how many pluggable devices you can install on a switch panel and what power consumption it consumes. ”
Sameh Boujelbene said that as of now, the business case for CPO does not exist, and the power envelope and heat dissipation rate of copper optical devices are still high.
Sameh Boujelbene said: "It is too early to have a CPO solution that can be deployed and mass-produced at scale in the next few years. 51.2Tb/s or even the next-generation 102.4Tb/s switches are unlikely to push vendors to switch to onboard optics. ”
"For CPOs to make sense, they have to bring about a significant drop in power consumption," she said. ”
She added that many in the industry believe they will be able to offer pluggable optical devices up to 3.2Tb/s per port without the need for a CPO approach.
Kevin Deierling also pointed out: "Most of the discussion in the industry around whether CPO is practical can be attributed to the cost-effectiveness of CPO, power, and mass production. ”
CPO still has challenges
In addition, Kevin Deierling said, the problem with CPO technology is not just an economic one.
This technology is very complex, and although it "promises" to be able to provide many advantages, CPO technology is not without challenges.
Kevin Deierling says, for example, optical modules are one of the components with a high failure rate in a switching system. "Today, if an optical module fails, only one port on the switch will collapse, and getting it back to normal is as simple as replacing the module. When you use on-board optics, bad things can happen depending on what the fault mechanism is. ”
Since the optical module is directly integrated on the switch, a single failure may cause the failure of multiple ports, which may cause the entire switch to be disconnected.
Chipmakers are investing heavily in CPOs
These challenges have not stopped chipmakers from investing billions of dollars in CPO and silicon-optical technology.
Late last year, Intel Labs announced the creation of a new research center to drive faster, more efficient computing interfaces by using optical generation. Meanwhile, Marvell acquired U.S. chipmaker Inphi for $10 billion.
Inphi focuses on optoelectronic interconnects, and its products are mainly used in cloud data centers. The company's products can provide throughput of up to 800Gb/s. In early 2021, Inphi partnered with networking giant Cisco to develop a 51.2Tb/s CPO switch, which is expected to be available sometime in early 2024.
A few weeks later, Broadcom released its first CPO switch, which combines a 25.6Tb/s Tomahawk 4 switch ASIC with integrated optical interconnect. The switch, known as Humboldt, is expected to be released in 2022, with a 51.2Tb/s capability switch coming out in 2023.
So why invest so much money in a technology that is unlikely to be competitive in the short term? Sameh Boujelbene said that because CPO technology is difficult.
"The reason why the industry is talking about CPO technology is because the learning curve is very steep." "There are a lot of issues that need to be solved... And we know that at some point we have to adopt a CPO. ”
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