Optical server networking should consume less power
High-end servers have Ethernet ports with 400, 800 and soon 1600 Gbit/s. Consumption and waste heat from electrical-optical converters are becoming a problem.
SFP module for 1 Gbit/s
(Image: c’t Magazin)
Optical cables are used to transmit Ethernet signals at 400 or 800 Gbit/s and soon also 1.6 Tbit/s over more than a few meters –, i.e. glass fibres or optical fibres (FO). However, different versions are used depending on the topology of the data center or cluster network. The fast Ethernet ports of servers therefore typically have cages for standardized electrical modules, which either transmit the signals electrically (for short distances) or convert them into optical signals for different types of fibre optic cables.
The power consumption of these electro-optical converters is increasingly becoming a problem. The widely used SFP (Small Form Factor Pluggable) modules for 1 Gbit/s and SFP+ for 10 Gbit/s are content with less than 2 watts.
More than 15 watts per port
(Image:Â FS Deutschland)
The significantly larger QFSP-DD design bundles eight 50 Gbit/s connections for a total of 400 Gbit/s and allows more than 14 watts. And for 800 Gbit/s, QFSP-DD800 is used with more than 16 watts and cooling fins on the top (finned top) to blow the heat out of the compact adapter.
STMicroelectronics (STMicro) aims to counteract this with electro-optical components made from BiCMOS B55X silicon germanium (SiGe) production technology.
Together with partners such as the cloud hyperscaler Amazon AWS, STMicro is working on the PIC100 plug-in module platform, which is to be used in modules for 800 Gbit/s and 1.6 Tbit/s in the second half of 2025.
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In addition to the actual converter chips, the partners are also optimizing other parts of the modules. The loss of the silicon fiber optic cable should be 0.4 dB/cm, that of the silicon nitride fiber optic cable on the chip 0.5 dB/cm.
Another solution that has been sought for years is to dispense with electro-optical converter modules by integrating optical transceivers directly into processors and computing accelerators. For example, there are proposals to integrate transceiver modules in the form of chiplets. However, this loses the flexibility to adapt the server to the existing optical network distribution.
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(ciw)
