OFC Panel Discuss Competing Pluggable Optics Solutions

• Speaker: Sorin Tibuleac, director, system architecture, ADVA Optical Networking; Frank Chang, Inphi Corporation (moderator); Bardia Pezeshki, CEO, Kaiam Corporation; Chris Pfistner, VP, product line management, Datacom, Lumentum; David Piehler, senior principal engineer, Dell EMC; Katharine Schmidtke, optical technology strategy, Facebook 
• Topics: Pluggable Optics – How Is the Ecosystem and Value Chain Changing?
• When: Wednesday, March 22, 3:30 p.m.
• Where: Theatre 1, Los Angeles Convention Center, Optical Networking and Communication Conference & Exhibition, Los Angeles, California, USA

Large DCI bottlenecks are dominated by the switch I/O BW and the front panel BW as a result of pluggable transceiver modules. Recently 50G and beyond transceivers have been developed that significantly reduce power, footprint and cost for three major types of connections: intra- and inter-data center, transport client, and metro/access. The detailed designs of the pluggables, however, have many flavors such as: four-wave or four-fiber 28GBd NRZ, two-wave 28GBd PAM4, single-wave 56GBd PAM4, or single-wave DMT, and so on. At the same time, to overcome the front panel BW and the switch ASIC BW limitation, one approach is to either move the optics onto the mid-plan or integrate the optics into the switch ASIC. There are many new MSAs in progress to be considered as well including CFP8, QSFP56, QSFP-DD, SFP56 and so on, or even chip on boards directly.