24. System Aspects for Optical Interconnect Transceivers

Data centers have shown and will continue to show tremendous growth. The data center requirements and the resulting architectures determine the optimal optical interconnect approach. This work outlines hyperscale data center architectures and implications for the optical transceiver technology used therein. The Microsoft hyperscale data center architecture leads to the choice of the four-lane parallel single-mode fiber (PSM4) transceiver as optimal. We review the various optical transmitter technologies, including directly modulated lasers (s), integrated distributed feedback laser/electroabsorption modulators (/), and silicon photonics (SiPho). The increase in optical signaling rates from 25 to 50–100 Gb\(/\)s per wavelength is described, along with their inclusion in defined optical specifications from the IEEE Ethernet standardization organization, as well as industry multisource agreements (s). Finally, we show how data center bandwidth requirements will lead to an evolution of optical packaging paradigms from pluggable modules to on-board-optics and copackaged optics.