As businesses, governments and comms operators alike deal with the need to invest in advanced network technologies to cope with the demands of ever higher workloads driven by artificial intelligence (AI), the recent near-packaged optics (NPO) Standards Industry Summit has concluded with the call that its foundational technology is the practical choice with lower risk and offering higher return on investment in future infrastructures.
Co-hosted by the International Photonics and Electronics Committee (Ipec) and the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF), the event focused on NPO evolution and international standards development on topics encompassing ecosystem upgrades and industry chain collaboration. It saw presentations from companies leading NPO development such as the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, Senko, Amphenol and Yamaichi.
The summit reached a consensus on international NPO standards, laying what the consortium clamed would be a “solid foundation” for the industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO.
At the heart of the summit was the issue of dealing with AI workloads, which has seen network scaling to clusters providing opportunities for optical interconnects as their electrical equivalents face hitting bottlenecks given their transmission range was short.
Speaking at the conference, Huawei noted that in what it called the age of computing power, companies were not just competing with the computing power of a single processing unit. Instead, they were focusing more on the capacity of clusters. In this part, it said optical communications plays an important role as the computing clusters keep scaling up, while at the same time, electrical interconnects cannot fully meet the demand of the fast ramp-up of clusters.
Among the key points made was that the networking technology industry was evolving from multi-die solutions to cluster to power “exponential” AI network evolution. NPO was reported as being an ideal candidate technology on a number of key criteria, namely: technology maturity; ramp-up speed; maintainability; power consumption; and latency. NPO was seen as being mature; offering rapid ramp-up; easy maintainability; being low-power; and delivering low-latency communications.
“As super points of delivery (SuperPoDs) continue to expand in scale, traditional optical modules are consuming huge amounts of energy and co-packaged optics (CPO) face constraints like a closed industry chain and complex operations and maintenance,” explained Zhao Wenyu, IPEC vice-chairman and deputy director of the Technology and Standards Research Institute at CAICT.
“In contrast, NPO, with its excellent energy efficiency, a favourable trade-off in port density and strong compatibility with existing pluggable ecosystems, is expected to become the preferred solution for SuperPoD interconnect in the near term, and coexist and evolve alongside CPO and other solutions in the long term.”
Tencent optical network architect Jiang Zhibin added: “As SuperPoDs expand in scale, and GPUs and switch chips increase their SerDes data rates, optical interconnect solutions will advance more rapidly towards 6.4T NPO.”
Ipec and OIF regarded the summit as marking a milestone for the development of the global NPO industry, with a consensus reached on international NPO standards and the paths for collaboration between standards organisations and the industry chain. They also believe that the joint exhibition of industry ecosystem products has strengthened industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem.
In a call to action, the conference urged NPO stakeholders across industry, academia, research institutions and user groups to “join hands” in developing NPO standards and driving the NPO ecosystem to evolve from “usable” to “easy-to-use at scale”. They added that looking ahead, there was an urgent need to use opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome the challenges introduced by advanced packaging processes.
For its part, as part of what it says is an exploration to find an optimal NPO interconnect solution or SuperPoDs, Huawei launched what it claims to be the industry’s first high-bandwidth 7.2T NPO product.
Demonstrated at the event, the NPO product is said to offer high bandwidth, high reliability and high availability while achieving low latency, low power consumption and low cost. The NPO is described as a “manifestation” of the various technologies Huawei has accumulated over the years, including the laser source, silicon photonics, electrical chips and vertical cavity surface emitting laser.
