F5: Wireline transceivers for Mega Data Centers: 50Gb/s and beyond

With the explosive data growth due to HD video content, IoT, and the rapid shift from enterprise to cloud computing, Mega Data Centers have become an essential part of the global network infrastructure. Despite their massive scale, Data Center architectures require software-defined network capability and scalability, with lower latency. Interconnects will need to support diversified media-types, higher data-rates (>50Gb/s per lane), and longer distance (up to 2km) to achieve this and still make economic sense. Once a niche for mainly VCSEL links in HPC, “Optical Ethernet” is now becoming mainstream as interconnects for both MMF and SMF in various fiber configurations are being defined within the standards. Also, copper links including backplane continue to be the interconnect with highest volume. The Forum will cover various wireline transceivers enabling Mega Data Centers such as ADC-based transceivers and Silicon Photonics, and challenges moving forward.