DustPhotonics announces 800G chip for hyperscale data centres and AI
DustPhotonics, a developer of silicon photonics solutions for hyperscale data centres and AI applications, has announced a new product, which they say is the industry's first merchant single-chip 800G DR8 PIC. The company made the announcement during ECOC, the largest optical communications exhibition in Europe.
DustPhotonics describes the new 800G PIC as a single-chip solution suitable for DR8 and DR8+ applications, providing 8 optical channels independently modulated at 100Gb/s for an aggregate bandwidth of 800Gb/s. The chip is designed into a compact 7.5mm x 7mm package, to enable its use in industry standard QSFP and OSFP style form factors. The device is suitable for reaches up to 2km in applications including hyperscale data centres and AI and Machine-Learning clusters.
The PIC includes on-chip lasers, incorporating DustPhotonics' patented L3C (low-loss laser coupling) technology, whereby off-the-shelf lasers from a variety of different manufacturers can be integrated with the PIC. According to the company, this confers advantages in product performance, cost, power, and supply chain scalability.
DustPhotonics is demonstrating this device at ECOC in multiple configurations, including a traditional 800GBASE-DR8 application, an immersion cooling application, and a reduced reach application. The immersion cooling demo showcases how this chip is suited to be immersed in a liquid coolant, since there is no free-space interface between the laser and PIC or at the fibre attach interface at the optical output of the chip. For the reduced reach application, DustPhotonics is demonstrating a second, cost-optimised version of the product, which the company says is suitable for transceivers or AOCs (Active Optical Cables) up to 100m, or for LPO (linear-drive pluggable optic) applications.
"We are seeing a lot of customer traction for this 800G application, and we are excited to showcase the broad range of applications that we support," said Ronnen Lovinger, CEO of DustPhotonics. "We are well-positioned for the next phase of the company which is to scale into high-volume manufacturing."
"We have been encouraged by the growth of the 800Gb/s market, and we believe DustPhotonics single-chip PIC solution will help fuel adoption while easing some of the early supply chain constraints we are seeing in the industry," said Vladimir Kozlov, Founder and CEO of LightCounting, an optical communications market research company.
