Welcome and opening remarks

Co-packaged optics are inching closer to reality

Martin Vallo Senior Analyst, Photonics Yole Intelligence (France)

To support the explosive growth of data volumes and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications optical-based interconnects will enter very- and ultra-short reach applications. Current pluggable form factors will be limited in their ability to support more than 800G capacity in terms of required electrical and optical densities, thermal aspects, and power consumption. Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) is a new approach that aims to overcome the abovementioned challenges. Moreover, new very-short-reach optical interconnects have also emerged for High Power Computing (HPC) and its new disaggregated architecture, which may gain even more popularity. Disaggregated design distinguishes the compute, memory, and storage components found on a server card and pools them separately. Today, only a few players have internal capabilities to bring proprietary CPO solutions to the market. Several strategic collaborations have been announced, and the first products have even appeared recently. This presentation will reveal trends in players’ strategies, future technologies, road maps and market forecasts for the co-packaged optics industry.

Martin Vallo serves as a Senior Analyst, Photonics, specialized in optical communication and semiconductor lasers within the Photonics and Sensing division at Yole Intelligence (Yole). With twelve years’ experience in semiconductor technology, Martin is involved today in the development of technology and market reports as well as the production of custom consulting projects at Yole. Prior his mission at Yole, he worked at CEA (Grenoble, France), with a mission focused on the epitaxial growth of InGaN/GaN core-shell nanowire LEDs by MOCVD, and their characterization for highly flexible photonic devices. Martin graduated from the Academy of Sciences, Institute of Electrical Engineering (Slovakia) with an Engineering degree in III-nitride semiconductors.

Chiplets enabled by silicon photonics

Eric Mounier Director of Market Research and Fellow Analyst Yole Intelligence (France)

Future optical transceivers must be smaller to decrease power consumption and increase data throughput. As such, progress in integration of optical component technologies has dramatically cut complexity and cost of the modules. Silicon Photonics (SiPho) is a key enabling technology for further development of optical interconnect solutions needed to address growing internet traffic. Today this technology plays an important role in 500 m and 80 km pluggable interconnects. Next, SiPho intends to become competitive technology in 5G wireless access networks. Additionally, SiPho is a key driving platform for co-packaged optics assembly and new very-short-reach optical interconnects for High Power Computing (HPC) and its new disaggregated architecture. With highly integrated optics and silicon chips, new engineering capabilities and foundries will be greatly desired. Evidence that the industry takes it seriously is that three hyperscale cloud operators – Meta, Microsoft and Tencent - actively support the penetration of CPO into their network architectures.

Eric Mounier is Director of Market Research and Fellow Analyst at Yole Intelligence, part of the Yole Group. With over twenty-five years’ experience within the semiconductor industry, Eric provides daily in-depth insights into current and future semiconductor trends, markets, and innovative technologies (quantum computing, Si photonics, new sensing technologies, new types of sensors, ...). With his relevant methodological expertise and a solid technological background, Eric works closely with all the teams at Yole to highlight disruptive technologies and analyze and present business opportunities through technology and market reports and custom consulting projects. Through numerous internal workshops on technologies, methodologies, best practices, and more, Yole’s Fellow Analyst ensures the training of Yole’s technology & market analysts. Eric has spoken at numerous international conferences, presenting his vision of the semiconductor industry and the latest technological innovations. He has also authored or co-authored more than 100 papers as well as more than 120 Yole technology and market reports. Prior to Yole, Eric held R&D and Marketing positions at CEA Leti (France). Eric holds a Ph.D. in Semiconductor Engineering and a degree in Optoelectronics from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (France).

CPO opportunities and challenges: a transceiver implementer's perspective

Vipul Bhatt VP of Marketing, Datacom Vertical Coherent Corp. (United States)

While co-packaged optics presents an opportunity to reduce power consumption, it also faces several technical and business challenges. From a transceiver implementer’s perspective, the two form factors – CPO and pluggable – are competing choices available to the customers, and therefore, must play by the same rules of success in the transceiver market. We will describe this balance and conclude with an opinion on what it will take for CPO to compete successfully in the market.

Vipul Bhatt is the VP of Marketing, Datacom Vertical, at Coherent Corp. Vipul has a track record of over 25 years of pioneering product and business development in optical networks, spanning companies such as Corning, Cisco and Inphi. He has been an active contributor to optical standards development in IEEE. He holds a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York.

Accelerating the adoption of co-packaged optical interconnects

Manish Mehta VP of Marketing and Operations Broadcom Inc. (United States)

Copper I/O is approaching a limit as data rates continue to move to higher speeds and more complex modulation. As the line rate increases for high-speed systems from 50G to 100G to 200G, losses through a standard system increase from under 10dB of loss to over 20dB of loss. As you reach 200G/lane, the board level complexity increases to where almost all board traces have a length that will exceed the loss budget to achieve even 1m DAC cable transmission out of the box. So how do you overcome this? Well, there are definitely great investments in technologies such as flyover cables and Active DACs. And these will generate meaningful adoption. But if you truly plan to scale, the right way to overcome this scale problem is to drive optical directly from the ASIC package.

Manish Mehta is the VP of Marketing and Operations for the Optical Systems Division at Broadcom. In this role, he leads go-to-market and delivery activities for the wide range of products the division develops including semiconductor lasers and silicon photonics products such as co-packaged optics. Prior to Broadcom, Manish was EVP of PLM at Source Photonics, an optical transceiver vendor, where he led the company's migration from access to datacenter focus and helped to successfully complete the sale of the business. Manish has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas and MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Challenges and opportunities for optics in cloud datacenters

Jake Joo Site Leader and Senior Technical Manager Dupont (United States)

Surging demand for Cloud services, especially those enabled by AI applications, has accelerated the adoption of next generation optical technologies. The innovations being adopted include 800G and 1.6T optical transceivers and AOCs, co-packaged optics and even optical switching. Can the industry supply chain keep up with the market demand and invest into development of new products? Is there an opportunity for new materials and device designs? How will datacenter architectures change in the future? These will be among the topics discussed representing the leading Cloud companies and their optics suppliers.

Jake Joo is the senior technical manager and a site leader in, Electronics and Industrial division at DuPont. In this role, he leads a technical group executing projects ranging from high speed, high frequency, optics, rigid and flex circuits, semiconductor packaging, thermal, and machine learning, and commercialized several products through key OEMs. He also holds a Board of Directors position at Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO). Before DuPont, Jake was a technical manager at Dow Chemical where he led an optoelectronic platform group within R&D. Jake received his BS in materials science and engineering from Seoul National University and his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.