1.6T Optical Transceiver Links Long-Distance Data Centers

What it means for hiring

Marvell's COLORZ 1600 is a pluggable optical module in the OSFP form factor that carries 1.6 terabits per second between data centres: up to 20 km across a campus, 120 km across a metro area and as far as 1,000 km between regions. Its coherent DSP is built on a 2 nm process, it runs dense wavelength-division multiplexing across the C and L bands, and it encrypts on the chip. Marvell's own pitch is that it removes the separate transport equipment that used to sit between sites.

Each time coherent optics shrinks into a module that a hyperscaler plugs straight into its own switches, work leaves the telecom equipment makers and lands in two places. One is the module and DSP companies, where coherent DSP designers, silicon photonics engineers and high-speed mixed-signal people were already the hardest hires in the industry, and a 2 nm tape-out does not make them easier to find. The other is the data centre operators themselves, who now need optical network engineers able to plan a long-haul DWDM link in house rather than buy it as a service. Both draw on the same people, and most of them learned the trade at the transport vendors. In Europe that experience sits in a handful of places, the optical teams of the big equipment makers and the Eindhoven photonics cluster, and every one of them is being approached.

Read the original at Electronic Design .