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Posts Tagged 'Optical Interconnect'

  • June 06, 2024

    Silicon Photonics Comes of Age

    This article is part four in a series on talks delivered at Accelerated Infrastructure for the AI Era, a one-day symposium held by Marvell in April 2024. 

    Silicon photonics—the technology of manufacturing the hundreds of components required for optical communications with CMOS processes—has been employed to produce coherent optical modules for metro and long-distance communications for years. The increasing bandwidth demands brought on by AI are now opening the door for silicon photonics to come inside data centers to enhance their economics and capabilities.  

    What’s inside an optical module?

    As the previous posts in this series noted, critical semiconductors like digital signal processors (DSPs), transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) and drivers for producing optical modules have steadily improved in terms of performance and efficiency with each new generation of chips thanks to Moore’s Law and other factors.

    The same is not true for optics. Modulators, multiplexers, lenses, waveguides and other devices for managing light impulses have historically been delivered as discrete components.

    “Optics pretty much uses piece parts,” said Loi Nguyen, executive vice president and general manager of cloud optics at Marvell. “It is very hard to scale.”

    Lasers have been particularly challenging with module developers forced to choose between a wide variety of technologies. Electro-absorption-modulated (EML) lasers are currently the only commercially viable option capable of meeting the 200G per second speed necessary to support AI models. Often used for longer links, EML is the laser of choice for 1.6T optical modules. Not only is fab capacity for EML lasers constrained, but they are also incredibly expensive. Together, these factors make it difficult to scale at the rate needed for AI.

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  • June 02, 2024

    A Deep Dive into the Copper and Optical Interconnects Weaving AI Clusters Together

    This article is part three in a series on talks delivered at Accelerated Infrastructure for the AI Era, a one-day symposium held by Marvell in April 2024.

    Twenty-five years ago, network bandwidth ran at 100 Mbps, and it was aspirational to think about moving to 1 Gbps over optical. Today, links are running at 1 Tbps over optical, or 10,000 times faster than cutting edge speeds two decades ago.

    Another interesting fact. “Every single large language model today runs on compute clusters that are enabled by Marvell’s connectivity silicon,” said Achyut Shah, senior vice president and general manager of Connectivity at Marvell.

    To keep ahead of what customers need, Marvell continually seeks to boost capacity, speed, and performance of the digital signal processors (DSPs), transimpedance amplifiers or TIAs, drivers, firmware and other components inside interconnects. It’s an interdisciplinary endeavor involving expertise in high frequency analog, mixed signal, digital, firmware, software and other technologies. The following is a map to the different components and challenges shaping the future of interconnects and how that future will shape AI.

    Inside the Data Center

    From a high level, optical interconnects perform the task their name implies: they deliver data from one place to another while keeping errors from creeping in during transmission. Another important task, however, is enabling data center operators to scale quickly and reliably.

    “When our customers deploy networks, they don’t start deploying hundreds or thousands at a time,” said Shah. “They have these massive data center clusters—tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of (computing) units—that all need to work and come up at the exact same time. These are at multiple locations, across different data centers. The DSP helps ensure that they don’t have to fine tune every link by hand.”

    Optical Interconnect Module

     

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  • December 07, 2021

    Optical Technologies for 5G Access Networks

    By Matt Bolig, Director, Product Marketing, Networking Interconnect, Marvell

    There’s been a lot written about 5G wireless networks in recent years.  It’s easy to see why; 5G technology supports game-changing applications like autonomous driving and smart city infrastructure.  Infrastructure investment in bringing this new reality to fruition will take many years and 100’s of billions of dollars globally, as figure 1 below illustrates.

    Figure 1: Cumulative Global 5G RAN Capex in $B (source: Dell’Oro, July 2021)

    When considering where capital is invested in 5G, one underappreciated aspect is just how much wired infrastructure is required to move massive amounts of data through these wireless networks. 

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