The data center era is experiencing an incredible evolution as organizations move quickly to achieve greater efficiencies and lower their total cost of operations. Recent breakthroughs in photonic technology are revolutionizing the data center data movement. POINT2 TECHNOLOGY & ATTO-TUDE Point2 Technology and AttoTude are leading the charge of this revolution. This is as opposed to photonic chips, which today constitute about 10 percent of a data center’s computing cost. They have a number of challenges, including temperate sensitivity and reliability obligations. Cutting costs, cutting time These new systems are designed to tackle these issues while providing better results.
Point2 Technology’s innovative scalable system uses one-third of the energy needed by today’s photonic chips and provides significant cost savings. Point2’s environment friendly system provides extraordinary latencies increase. As an example, it gets latency as low as one-thousandth that of existing photonic solutions! This jump in performance couldn’t come at a better time with data centers already in the process of massively scaling out their operations.
Challenges in Photonic Technology
Photonic chips are extremely sensitive to temperature changes, as even minimal fluctuations can greatly affect their precision. They need to be manufactured with micrometer-precision to allow such precise alignment of light entering and exiting the chips. This kind of precision is important. This infrared laser light must be perfectly focused into the core of an optical fiber that is only 10 micrometers wide—equivalent to only a few human hairs.
Additionally, photonic chips are well known to suffer a long-term reliability crisis, which has worried data center operators. As Dave Welch explains, “Electronics have been demonstrated to be inherently more reliable than optics.” This declaration points to the most urgent problem currently facing our industry. Component longevity can have a huge influence on total operational costs.
The difficulty of precisely mating optical fibers to optical waveguides on photonic integrated circuits remains an ongoing hurdle. Making this micrometer connection at a large scale while maintaining that degree of precision is an engineering challenge still requiring sophisticated solutions.
The Role of Point2 Technology and AttoTude
Point2 Technology has created an e-Tube fiber system with transmission capacity over 200 gigabits independently. This breakthrough technology provides data centers with a cost-effective, energy-efficient opportunity to scale their operations. Point2’s system is one-third the cost of conventional photonic chips. Couple this price tag with its fuel economy and LEAF is a no-brainer for all cost-conscious operators.
AttoTude’s tech is an evolution of decades of cutting-edge research in photonics spearheaded by Dave Welch. Their second-generation cable makes use of a dual-system that promises to keep losses down to a mere 0.3 decibels per meter. That’s a greater than fourfold jump in efficiency. These kinds of cable design innovations are key to achieving improved photonics integration into today’s data center ecosystem.
“Customers love fiber. But what they hate is the photonics.” This industry sentiment is indicative of a broader trend taking hold. Operators are clamoring for more dependable high-speed links, and they don’t need the headaches associated with more typical photonic elements.
Industry Trends and Future Directions
Industry luminaries like Nvidia and Broadcom are introducing new optical transceivers. From our perspective, this move is indicative of a large trend toward tilting optics to fit conveniently into processor packages. This advancement enables much closer spacing between electronics and optics, creating better performance with less latency. This trend is pushing data centers to adopt optical technologies faster than ever before. These new developments hold tremendous potential to increase throughput and efficiency.
Beyond these difficulties in realizing and working with photonic chips, the drive to optical interconnects is powerful. Together, imec and Silicon Photonics are driving the creation of more breakthrough solutions. They leverage these new technologies to develop smarter, faster, safer ways to move goods and people.
As the industry evolves, experts agree that getting excited about performance should not outpace delivering reliable performance. “You start with passive copper, and you do everything you can to run in passive copper as long as you can,” states Don Barnetson, highlighting the ongoing reliance on traditional technologies even as optical solutions gain traction.