Open Eye MSA formed to speed adoption of 50-400Gbps PAM4 data-center interconnects based on CDR architectures

The Open Eye industry consortium has announced the establishment of its multi-source agreement (MSA) outlining its mission to standardize advanced specifications for lower-latency, more power-efficient and lower-cost optical modules for data-center interconnects over single-mode and multi-mode fiber.

The MSA aims to accelerate the adoption of 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) optical interconnects scaling to 50Gbps, 100Gbps, 200Gbps and 400Gbps by expanding on existing standards to enable optical module implementations using less complex, lower-cost, lower-power and optimized clock & data recovery (CDR)-based architectures in addition to existing digital signal processing (DSP) architectures.

Minimizing the need for digital signal processing in optical modules has many advantages including significantly lowering latency, power consumption and cost. The Open Eye industry consortium says that it is committed to investing its collective innovation and engineering resources for the development of an industry-standard optical interconnect that leverages seamless component interoperability among a broad group of technology providers, including electronics, lasers and optical components.

“Sales of next-generation Ethernet products will exceed $500m in 2020,” forecasts Dale Murray, principal analyst at market research firm LightCounting. “However, this is only possible if suppliers can meet customer requirements for cost and power consumption. The new Open Eye MSA addresses both of these critical requirements. Having low latency is an extra bonus that HPC [high-performance computing] and AI [artificial intelligence] applications will benefit from.”

The Open Eye MSA consortium’s approach is a natural evolution of existing high-volume optical nodes, enabling users to scale to next-generation baud rates. The initial Open Eye MSA specification will focus on 53Gbps-per-lane PAM-4 solutions for 50G SFP, 100G DSFP, 100G SFP-DD, 200G QSFP and 400G QSFP-DD and OSFP single-mode modules. Subsequent specifications will aim to address multi-mode and 100Gbps-per-lane applications.

Formation of the Open Eye MSA was initiated by MACOM and Semtech Corp, with 19 current members in Promoter and Contributing membership classes.

Promoters include Applied Optoelectronics Inc, Cambridge Industries (CIG), Color Chip, Juniper Networks, Luxshare-ICT, MACOM, Mellanox, Molex and Semtech Corp.

Contributors include: Accelink, Cloud Light Technology, InnoLight, Keysight Technologies, Maxim Integrated, O-Net, Optomind, Source Photonics and Sumitomo Electric.

The initial specification release is planned for Fall 2019, with product availability to follow later in the year. Companies interested in joining the Open Eye MSA can e-mail [email protected].

Tags: Optical transceivers 400G

Visit: www.openeye-msa.org