As the world's largest optical communication industry event, OFC attracts professionals from the global optical communication field to gather together every year, where everyone presents themselves and exchanges the latest technologies and industry trends. In 2023, after the epidemic, OFC will bring everyone together again to communicate and interact with peers, understand the latest achievements and market trends in the field of optical communications, and meet many friends for the first time after the epidemic to exchange their views.

At the OFC site, 800G is still a hot spot this year, and one of the optical module solutions with lower power consumption and lower latency has become the biggest bright spot in the market--800G Linear drive solution, from the discussion upstairs all the demonstrations downstairs have become the most popular keywords. This solution eliminates the dependence of optical module products on DSP chips/CDR chips, and uses switch chips for signal compensation. It has the advantages of low power consumption and low delay, becoming one of the solutions that more and more optical module manufacturers are vying to focus on.

At the MACOM booth, the single-channel 100G single-mode 800G DR8 and multi-mode 800G SR8 Linear Drive solutions were displayed. In terms of power consumption, multi-mode saves 70%, single-mode saves 50%, and can reduce power consumption by 75% delay. The president of MACOM China said: MACOM launched the concept of Linear Drive a few years ago, and invested in the research and development of high-performance Driver and TIA product solutions based on this concept, named PURE DRIVE. MACOM can provide a variety of Driver and TIA product portfolio solutions based on linear direct drive 800G optical modules. Currently, many data center end users, switching chip manufacturers and optical module suppliers recognize the benefits brought by the linear direct drive solution, and actively invest in the research and development of corresponding products, making it one of the highlights of OFC this year.

At Arista's booth, we also saw a low-power 800G optical transmission solution. Compared with the 5nm DSP solution, the 800G-DR8 Linear Drive solution can save 30% of the power consumption and reach 7W. This is also the first Linear solution highlighted by a switch manufacturer. It is said that it is being recognized by multiple switch manufacturers, including Broadcom, NVIDIA and so on.

On the one hand, Linear's solution is limited by the transmission distance and has limited application scenarios. Whether it can really occupy the transmission and interconnection market within 2km still needs the industry's efforts to achieve mass production as soon as possible. On the other hand, as the optical interface realizes the solution of transmitting 200G per channel, everyone has more expectations for the EML solution. While everyone is considering whether 800G come, they have already begun to demonstrate the innovative solution of 1.6T. For the 8*200G solution, many manufacturers have released OSFP-XD DR8+ optical modules one after another.

In addition, thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) has also become another hot spot in the market. Manufacturers on display believe that thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) material will be an ideal replacement for III-V and silicon materials.

Finally, at the application level, the demand for computing power networks brought about by leading artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will become an important driving force for future high-interconnection optical interconnection.

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