Thursday, October 6, 2022

Optica and COBO to host Co-Packaged and Pluggable Optics Summit

Optica (formerly OSA)  and the Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) will host the Co-Packaged and Pluggable Optics Industry Summit at the DuPont Silicon Valley Technology and Innovation Center in Sunnyvale, California on 26-27 October 2022. 

The in-person-only event will feature presentations from Microsoft, Google, Meta, Intel, NVIDIA, Arista, Juniper Networks, Marvell, Infinera, Broadcom, Corning, MACOM, Molex, HG Genuine, Ayar Labs, and more.

Optica and COBO have partnered to accelerate discussions on how photonic solutions address global bandwidth predictions of 30% in 2022. Leading data center operators report that today's compute offerings do not meet the demands of expected workloads of the near future and require that photonics technologies evolve quickly, cost-effectively, and greenly.

"We are in a transition period," said Jose Pozo, Optica chief technology officer. "As the global bandwidth pressure grows on datacom providers, major corporations need to ensure key photonics technologies are as close as possible to the processing units inside data centers."

"There are diverse approaches in the market today, and each company has its own roadmap. For the supply chain to meet industry demands, technology companies and hyperscalers must align several options to offer the fastest, greenest and most cost-effective path for data center companies including, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. There is urgency in coordinating approaches now."

Brad Booth, president of COBO and principal engineer, Azure Hardware Architecture at Microsoft, added, "The growing diversity of optical applications within the data center is driving the increased need to enhance high-speed board level interconnect systems and COBO members recognize it is critical for companies to collaborate. We expect important insights and decisions to come from this gathering."

https://www.onboardoptics.org/optica-2022