A new report from Cignal AI finds that linear optics face sizable business and technical challenges despite the promise of significant system power savings.
According to the newly released Active Insight report “The Linear Drive Market Opportunity,” only a fraction of Cignal AI’s 800GbE datacenter optics forecast will employ Linear Drive by 2027.
“There is tremendous excitement for Linear Drive architecture because it addresses the most challenging design problem for high-speed datacenter optics – power consumption – head on,” said Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst for Optical Components at Cignal AI. “But while researching the market opportunity, we found that market and technical challenges will limit Linear Drive optics to select hyperscale applications.”
Key findings:
- Linear Drive offers compelling power savings, but competing solutions are being developed in parallel that will dull its impact.
- Issues around switch chip support, system design, interoperability, and timing will limit the overall size of the Linear Drive market opportunity.
- Given the amount of investment being funneled into Linear Drive, some modules will be deployed in niche cases within homogenous hyperscale datacenters.
- Cignal AI anticipates that less than 10% of our 800GbE datacenter optics forecast will use Linear Drive.
