News: Optoelectronics
7 March 2023
Ranovus demos 800G Ethernet interoperable link to scale AMD adaptive SoCs for AI/ML
Ranovus Inc of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (which develops and manufactures multi-terabit photonics interconnect solutions for data-center and communications networks) has announced interoperability of AMD’s Versal adaptive SoCs with the co-packaged Odin 800G direct-drive optical engine and third-party 800G DR8+ re-timed pluggable modules. The interoperability demonstration is part of the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition (OFC 2023) in San Diego, CA, USA (7–9 March) and highlights the versatility of Ranovus’s Odin portfolio for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and communications applications.
Ranovus’ Odin is a low-latency, high-density, protocol-agnostic and standards-based optical engine that delivers massive optical interconnect bandwidth with what is claimed to be industry-leading cost and power efficiency. Built on GlobalFoundries’ Fotonix monolithic RF/CMOS silicon photonics (SiPh) platform, Odin incorporates Ranovus’s proprietary RF CMOS, silicon photonics, laser and advanced packaging technologies for volume manufacturing. Odin is suited to next-generation data-center architectures built on co-packaged optics (CPO), near-packaged optics (NPO), and pluggable OSFP/QSFP-DD/OSFP XD optical modules.
“We announced the first generation of our Odin optical interconnect at OFC 2022 for proprietary AI/ML applications. We are thrilled to showcase our standards-based Odin optical interconnect product with 5pJ/bit for a direct-drive CPO solution,” says Dr Christoph Schulien, head of Systems and High-Speed IC R&D. “Its inherent versatility enables hyperscale data-center providers to drastically reduce power consumption and optimize density and cost as they deploy novel hybrid data-center architectures in response to the insatiable growth in AI/ML workloads,” he adds.
“Ranovus’ demonstration of interoperability between our Versal adaptive SoCs co-packaged with Odin 800G direct-drive CPO 2.0 and third-party 800G DR8+ re-timed pluggable modules underlines the flexibility and scalability of Ranovus’ technology,” comments Yohan Frans, VP engineering at AMD. “We are proud of our collaboration with Ranovus in demonstrating the performance and versatility of monolithic silicon photonics interconnects as data-center and 5G customers deploy highly efficient and cost-effective systems for next-generation workloads,” he adds.
“Ranovus’ demonstration of interoperability between CPO and pluggable modules is a key proof point that their interconnect technology supports the flexibility and scalability with the lowest power consumption sought by hyper-scalers as they optimize their data centers for AI/ML workloads,” comments Vladimir Kozlov, founder & CEO of LIGHTCOUNTING.
At OFC, the Odin optical interconnect CPO, NPO and 800Gbps DR8+ pluggable module portfolio is being demonstrated at Ranovus’ booth #2019 and at GlobalFoundries’ booth #5216. Also, Ranovus is participating in panel discussions on ‘Advanced Packaging Technologies for Optical Modules’ (8 March, 8am) and ‘Enabling Next Generation Co-Packaging Solutions’ (9 March, 12:15pm).
