Has the era of co-packaged optics finally arrived?

Part 3: Co-packaged optics: Ayar Labs CEO interview

Mark Wade, newly appointed CEO of Ayar Labs, shares what his new role entails and why, after a decade-long journey, co-packaged optics' time has come.

Ayar Labs' CEO, Mark Wade

Mark Wade, the recently appointed CEO of Ayar Labs, says his new role feels strangely familiar. Wade finds himself revisiting tasks he performed in the early days of the start-up that he helped co-found. 

“In the first two years, I would do external-facing stuff during the day and then start working on our chips from 5 PM to midnight,” says Wade, who until last year was the company’s chief technology officer (CTO).  

More practically, says Wade, he has spent much of the first months since becoming CEO living out of a suitcase and meeting with customers, investors, and shareholders. 

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Lockheed Martin looks to pooling and optical I/O

Electronic systems must peer into ever-greater swathes of the electromagnetic spectrum to ensure a battlefield edge.

Michael HoffSuch electronic systems are used in ground, air, and sea vehicles and even in space.

The designs combine sensors and electronic circuitry for tasks such as radar, electronic warfare, communications and targeting.

Existing systems are custom designs undertaking particular tasks. The challenge facing military equipment makers is that enhancing such systems is becoming prohibitively expensive.

One proposed cost-saving approach is to develop generic radio frequency (RF) and sensor technology that can address multiple tasks.

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Ayar Labs gets to work with leading AI and HPC vendors

Optical interconnect specialist Ayar Labs has announced that it is working with Nvidia, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning silicon, systems and software.

In February Ayar Labs announced a strategic collaboration with the world’s leading high-performance computing (HPC) firm, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Charles Wuischpard

Both Nvidia and HPE were part of the Series C funding worth $130 million that Ayar Labs secured in April.

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The various paths to co-packaged optics

Near package optics has emerged as companies have encountered the complexities of co-packaged optics. It should not be viewed as an alternative to co-packaged optics but rather a pragmatic approach for its implementation.

Co-packaged optics will be one of several hot topics at the upcoming OFC show in March.

Placing optics next to silicon is seen as the only way to meet the future input-output (I/O) requirements of ICs such as Ethernet switches and high-end processors.

Brad Booth

For now, pluggable optics do the job of routing traffic between Ethernet switch chips in the data centre. The pluggable modules sit on the switch platform’s front panel at the edge of the printed circuit board (PCB) hosting the switch chip.

But with switch silicon capacity doubling every two years, engineers are being challenged to get data into and out of the chip while ensuring power consumption does not rise.

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Compute vendors set to drive optical I/O innovation

Part 2: Data centre and high-performance computing trends

Professor Vladimir Stojanovic has an engaging mix of roles.

When he is not a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, he is the chief architect at optical interconnect start-up, Ayar Labs.

Professor Vladimir Stojanovic

Until recently Stojanovic spent four days each week at Ayar Labs. But last year, more of his week was spent at Berkeley.

Stojanovic is a co-author of a 2015 Nature paper that detailed a monolithic electronic-photonics technology. The paper described a technological first: how a RISC-V processor communicated with the outside world using optical rather than electronic interfaces. 

It is this technology that led to the founding of Ayar Labs.

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Preparing for a post-pluggable optical module world

Part 1: OIF: ELSFP, XSR+, and CEI-112G-Linear

The OIF is working on several electrical and optical specifications as the industry looks beyond pluggable optical transceivers.

One initiative is to specify the external laser source used for co-packaged optics, dubbed the External Laser Small Form Factor Pluggable (ELSFP) project. 

Nathan Tracy

Industry interest in co-packaged optics, combining an ASIC and optical chiplets in one package, is growing as it becomes increasingly challenging and costly to route high-speed electrical signals between a high-capacity Ethernet switch chip and the pluggable optics on the platform’s faceplate.

The OIF is also developing 112-gigabit electrical interfaces to address not just co-packaged optics but also near package optics and the interface needs of servers and graphics processor units (GPUs).

Near package optics also surrounds the ASIC with optical chiplets. But unlike co-packaged optics, the ASIC and chiplets are placed on a high-performance substrate located on the host board.

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The future of optical I/O is more parallel links

Chris Cole has a lofty vantage point regarding how optical interfaces will likely evolve.

As well as being an adviser to the firm II-VI, Cole is Chair of the Continuous Wave-Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CW-WDM) multi-source agreement (MSA). 

Chris Cole

The CW-WDM MSA recently published its first specification document defining the wavelength grids for emerging applications that require eight, 16 or even 32 optical channels.

And if that wasn’t enough, Cole is also the Co-Chair of the OSFP MSA, which will standardise the OSFP-XD (XD standing for extra dense) 1.6-terabit pluggable form factor that will initially use 16, 100 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) electrical lanes. And when 200Gbps electrical input-output (I/O) technology is developed, OSFP-XD will become a 3.2-terabit module. 

Directly interfacing with 100Gbps ASIC serialiser/ deserialiser (serdes) lanes means the 1.6-terabit module can support 51.2-terabit single rack unit (1RU) Ethernet switches without needing 200Gbps ASIC serdes required by eight-lane modules like the OSFP.

“You might argue that it [the OSFP-XD] is just postponing what the CW-WDM MSA is doing,” says Cole. “But I’d argue the opposite: if you fundamentally want to solve problems, you have to go parallel.”

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