- The entire fiber ecosystem is racing to keep pace with the demands of AI
- One Ciena exec gives a lot of credit to Corning for innovations in fiber optic glass
- The next frontier will be fiber optic innovation within the data center
CIENA VECTORS EVENT, OTTAWA, CANADA — The OFC conference in March was jam-packed with high-level sessions, where the brightest of the bright got together to share technical research about optical communications. And at last week’s Ciena conference, Fierce Network asked Jërgen Hatheier, chief technology officer for International at Ciena, what’s driving all the latest research in optical.
“If you look a little bit under the cover, a lot of the science and innovation is now being driven by the data centers, which realize ‘hey, it's not only about the GPUs, but it's also about how you connect inside and outside the data centers,’” Hatheier said.
He added that the pace of innovation on the compute side requires the connection side to keep up. “We have explosive [growth], not only flops in the compute, but also the interface speeds going from 100 Mbps to 400 to 800 to 1.6 Tbps on a server, then optical needs to really stay on task to not fall behind and connect all these elements.”
Innovation in fiber, too
Rebecca Smith, SVP of corporate marketing and communications with Ciena, said the whole fiber ecosystem is having to innovate at a faster pace to keep up. That includes the modems created by Ciena to propagate light down fiber. But it’s also the fiber optic glass, itself, which is produced by the likes of Corning.
In recent years, the fiber optic industry has advanced to multi-core and hollow-core fiber. Multi-core fiber contains multiple cores within a single cladding, and each core can carry an independent optical signal, allowing parallel data transmission in the same fiber. Hollow core fiber guides light through a hollow, air-filled core rather than through solid glass, which is how traditional optical fibers work.
Although Ciena is not involved in developing that fiber, it is working with the people in the industry who build the fibers.
“A generational change of fiber is going to take a decade,” said Hatheier. “But the innovation that we've seen over just the last 18 months has been staggering.”
“As part of Vectors, we are showing performance of these fibers in our lab; we are educating the customers because it's going to be very evolutionary,” he said. “We are working in an ecosystem, right? Computer networking, together with optical transmission, and fiber. One of the synergies that is going to drive a lot of value is our WaveLogic together with new types of fibers."
Smith noted, “The fact that the fibers are getting more sophisticated and are better designed means we can do more on our modems. It's not just us that is rapidly innovating and bringing up new generations of coherent technology. We're also seeing the fibers getting more sophisticated.”
Opportunity inside the data center
When Fierce Network asked Dell’Oro analyst Jimmy Yu what he considered were the most interesting aspect of OFC 25, he said it was the fact that more companies are getting into data center optical components.
He noted that Cisco Acacia announced a new PAM4 DSP called Kibo for 1.6 Tbps (200 Gbps per lane) optical plugs with samples planned for 2025. And he said Ciena announced working silicon for 400 Gbps per lane PAM4 transmission, gearing up for 3.2 Tbps client optics in the future.
“Both of these announcements are for client optics, a space that neither really played in before,” said Yu. “However, they are both big suppliers of high-speed coherent optics used in network backbones and data center interconnects. I guess it was just a matter of time for these two suppliers to want in on the huge opportunities inside data center optics.”