The data center industry is changing like never before. This is leading companies to innovate on all fronts to improve efficiency and reliability in their operations. This traditional photonics technology is a double-edged sword. It eats up to 10 percent of a data center’s compute budget and has long-term reliability and temperature sensitivity problems. Leading companies are taking the initiative to address these gaps. Credo, Point2 Technology, and AttoTude are just a few companies blazing new trails with innovative solutions that could change the way we connect data.
Photonic technology, or more simply photonics, is defined by its use of light-based signals for data transmission. Micrometer-precision manufacturing is critical for delivery of infrared laser light into the core of optical fibers. These fibers are significantly small, as small as 10 µm wide. This costly complexity creates less reliable service, so industry leaders are searching for ways to do it differently.
The Drawbacks of Photonics
Industry insiders have known for years that photonics can’t save data centers. The highly sensitive nature of photonic systems to temperature variations often results in performance failures and variability. The dependence on precision manufacturing adds extra cost and opportunities for failure.
Customers love fiber. What they hate is the photonics. The industry is beginning to recognize and realize the benefits of fiber optics. Yet, it wrestles with the natural constraints that photonics offers.
Electronics, shown to be more reliable than their optical counterparts, offer opportunities to mitigate those vulnerabilities. Welch drives home this point by saying, “Electronics have proven to be fundamentally more reliable than optics. This underlying difference motivates the quest for solutions that can connect these two radically different technologies.
Innovative Solutions from Industry Leaders
Credo, a technology leader in this area, has taken great steps forward with their Advanced Electrical Connector (AEC). According to Don Barnetson of Credo, this new data transporting technology is able to transmit data at an incredible 800 Gb/s. It operates brilliantly over ranges up to seven meters. This is why Barnetson insists on starting with passive copper. His key takeaway is to make it work for you for as long as you can. This new approach demonstrates the movement towards extracting the most value out of current copper technologies before jumping to more intricate networks.
While no one company has achieved this feat just yet, Point2 Technology is working on eight e-Tube fiber cables. Each fiber can carry more than 200 gigabits per second! Further, they intend to produce the chips for a new 1.6-terabit-per-second undersea cable using eight thin polymer waveguides. This pioneering technique achieves dramatic energy savings, lowering power use to only one-third that of comparable optical systems. Beyond that, it saves money and reduces latency.
AttoTude is doing its part to this quickly changing scene. Welch predicts that his company’s new waveguide technology will allow transmission over distances up to 20 meters. AttoTude designed specific components, such as a digital data “chip” and a short-range terahertz-signal generator. This innovation is one more example of their deep commitment to reliability.
The Future Landscape of Data Centers
Tech giants such as Nvidia are already making ambitious climate-related growth projections. They intend to increase the maximum number of GPUs per system by eight times by 2027, driving an even larger demand for future high-performance data transmission technologies. Nvidia and Broadcom are just two companies satisfying this need by rolling out optical transceivers. They package these transceivers together with processors, illustrating an intense move towards design efficiency.
Point2 Technology and AttoTude advocate for a market solution that provides a path between legacy copper and optical choices. In addition, they bring to the table exciting new methodologies that are challenging the establishment. They are focusing on building out high-bandwidth alternatives. This approach foreshadows a broader shift in how data centers may operate going forward, without sacrificing reliability.
There’s no question these companies are doing pretty remarkable things, though. They are proactively working to address the future bandwidth needs, which are approaching a terabit-per-second. As David Kuo from Point2 Technology highlights, the physics of copper cables necessitates that they be manufactured shorter and thicker to meet these demands effectively.