Huawei demonstrated its first in-industry near-package optical module with a capacity of 7.2 terabits at the China International Optoelectronics Exhibition on September 10th. The module operated at a speed of 200 gigabits per lane across 36 channels, while the international standards body developing the specification for this technology is focused on a lower throughput.
During a press roundtable at the exhibition, Dr. Man Jianwei, Director of Huawei's Advanced Optoelectronics Laboratory, stated that the company previously introduced optical interconnects in its first-generation Atlas 910C SuperPoD, followed by the implementation of LPO in the Atlas 950 SuperPoD. Now, in the third generation of the product, they have developed an NPO with 7.2 Tbit capacity, which will be used in the future SuperPoD series.
Man told Pandaily that the module is not exclusively intended for Huawei's proprietary systems. He emphasized that Huawei actively supports industry synergy, so while the NPO will be applied in the SuperPoD series, the company is also prepared to share this product with lower-tier supply chain customers and upper-tier suppliers, including vendors from various countries and regions.
Near-package technology places the optical engine at the edge of the switching chip substrate, approximately five centimeters away from the ASIC, which is significantly closer than the roughly twenty centimeters required for a front-panel pluggable module. Dr. Man noted that integrating multiple functions into the chip and eliminating the oDSP allowed latency to be reduced from 100 nanoseconds to just 10 nanoseconds, and power consumption to be lowered by about 60%, collectively leading to a substantial cost reduction.
This demonstration took place before the module needed to comply with the established standard. Before May, work on the NPO was divided among several multi-party agreements, none of which constituted a formal international standards body. Man pointed to the fragmentation among standardization organizations such as CPX, MIC, and ODXU, stressing the urgent need for an authoritative body to advance NPO standardization, naming OIF as such an entity.
At the second quarter plenary session of the Optical Internetworking Forum in May, the NPO module project was officially launched with support from over 40 companies, with Huawei positioning itself as the initiator and main proponent of this proposal. However, when asked about the 12.8 Tbit figure associated with the project, Man distanced himself from it, clarifying that this specification belongs not to Huawei but to the OIF NPO project. He added that two main specifications are discussed on the OIF platform: 6.4 Tbit and 12.8 Tbit, with 6.4 Tbit being the primary focus, and 12.8 Tbit representing an extension of 6.4 Tbit.
