Marvell announces new 800 Gbps coherent DSP
Data infrastructure company Marvell has announced a new coherent digital signal processor (DSP) called Orion. The firm says Orion is the industry’s first 800 Gbps coherent DSP for pluggable modules, and is intended to change the economics and performance of the transport networks connecting carrier and cloud assets over extended geographic areas.
Marvell has stated that Orion delivers twice the maximum bandwidth over today’s solutions while staying within the stringent thermal and electrical limits of pluggable modules. This gives carriers and cloud service providers the opportunity to shift from building transport networks with traditional optical transport networking transmission equipment to designing networks around streamlined, scalable architectures built on merchant routers, integrated optical modules and other technologies for a lower total cost of ownership.
Orion-based pluggable modules are expected to deliver up to 75% in capex and opex savings over traditional transport equipment for popular carrier use cases such as metro networks. Orion-based modules are also expected to provide 30% lower cost and power per bit compared to currently available pluggable modules.
By spanning a wider range of transport lengths and bandwidth capacities, Orion aims to increase the performance of pluggable modules across multiple use cases, including metro network connections, 600 Gbps regional network connections, 400 Gbps long-haul connections, and 800 Gbps data centre interconnects.
“Orion represents a tipping point for optical transport technology,” said Achyut Shah, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Connectivity Business Group at Marvell. “With Orion, pluggable modules will be able to be deployed across these complex, high-performance networks while delivering substantial reductions in cost and power. Orion-based modules will also deliver the bandwidth needed for data centre interconnects to meet the exploding demand for AI. Fuelled by the innovation of our partners, pluggable modules based on Orion will become the leading choice for carriers and clouds.”
A Versatile Architecture
Produced on 5nm technology, Orion is the fifth generation coherent DSP from Marvell and offers twice the bandwidth in the same small module form factors as Deneb and Canopus, Marvell’s 400 Gbps coherent DSPs that have been widely adopted by carriers and clouds.
Orion is a coherent DSP supporting standards-based pluggable form factors at symbol rates in excess of 130+ GBaud, which allows Orion-based modules to transfer data at a faster rate and across longer distances than current modules. Orion incorporates Marvell’s 112 Gbps SerDes developed as part of Marvell’s technology platform for 5nm devices.
Orion complies with OIF, OpenZR+, OpenROADM, and IEEE standards and can be used in the QSFP-DD, OSFP, and CFP2 form factors, to support widespread transition into coherent pluggable-enabled architectures.
Orion-based modules could also pave the way for greater adoption of IPoDWDM. Many carriers are in the midst of once-in-a-decade upgrade of their core network routers—which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and occupy multiple racks—from 100 Gbps to 400 Gbps. Coupled with Orion-based modules, 400 Gbps IPoDWDM routers could match the performance of existing transport equipment at a far lower cost.
“Marvell’s Orion DSP represents the next step in coherent pluggables after the unprecedented popularity of 400 Gbps modules,” said Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst for Optical Components at Cignal AI. “Orion creates the opportunity to eliminate hardware and significantly reduce costs in regional to long-haul networks, and our conservative forecast calls for nearly 300,000 shipments of 800 Gbps-capable pluggable modules a year by 2027.”
