APC Says Let There Be Light, With Raft Of Standards To Speed Up Photonics Manufacturing

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APC Says Let There Be Light, With Raft Of Standards To Speed Up Photonics Manufacturing
The Advanced Photonics Coalition has given the green light for a slew of standards it says should allow “high volume manufacturing” of optical networking kit.
The announcement, at the PECC Summit earlier this week, comes amidst concerns about shortages of key components and materials needed for manufacturing optical networking gear, even as the surging AI industry starts hitting the “copper wall.” As Gbps demands rise, copper’s reach gets ever shorter, while heat emissions and energy consumption increases.
But the photonics industry is struggling to scale. Earlier this month, Lumentum Holdings told Bloomberg that its optical components are “completely sold out” through to 2029, and it won’t be able to meet demand for some products between now and 2028. The company produces indium phosphide components which are critical for photonics. China is a major producer of indium phosphide adding an extra level of geopolitical stress to the supply chain.
Lumentum’s backers include Nvidia, whose founder and CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated its Spectrum X co-packaged optics-based technology at GTC this week.
“So we now have extremely high data rate, extremely high quality data that comes directly onto the chip, and this goes directly into transceivers without going through a PCB and a transceiver goes right into the optics,” enthused Huang.
More broadly, datacenter operators are banking on optical to deliver more data to their pricey GPUs and increase efficiency as the technology requires less power and produces less heat.
Earlier this month, McKinsey flagged networking as one of the areas that “requires improvement” as AI becomes more and more about inference, advising operators “deploy optics-integrated switches (CPO) for higher bandwidth density and lower power per bit.” And it flagged up the need for “open interconnect” saying “a specialized architecture only earns it cost at volume.”
But statements like Lumentum’s raise the fear that optical networking components are heading towards the sort of shortages – and surging prices - already plaguing high end DRAM and flash storage.
The APC said this week that “By establishing common manufacturing, interface, and test practices, APC aims to remove implementation variations that add no market value and overcome supply chain silos that constrain volume.”
Its standards portfolio “supports multiple sourcing and broader supplier participation, helping the industry build an open and scalable photonics ecosystem.”
The portfolio covers:
• System Level Architecture Overview for Co-Packaged Optics
• Co-Packaged Optics Informative Outlook and Recommended Practices
• Silicon Photonics for Co-Packaged Optics Recommended Test Practices
• 4-Core Multicore Fiber Cable, Connector and Fiber Array Unit Specification
• Silicon Photonics Manufacturing Specification
Photonics developer Resolight is one of the companies on the APC working group.
“There are two technologies that today are independent and actually co-deployed in scale up,” said Ofer Shapiro, Resolight CEO. “One is traditional slow switching OCS that they're using to reconfigure the network. And the other one is data switches that are working 1,000 times faster.”
Resolight sees the APC standards as an endorsement of its Nanosecond optical circuit switching approach, addressing the protocol integration needed to enable native photon routing through nanosecond optical circuit switching (OCS).
“Native photon routing extends optical switching into the data plane itself, directing coordinated data transfers through the network while keeping their payloads in the light domain,” it said in a statement.
By reducing repeated optical to electrical to optical conversions, its architecture could deliver a massive boost in network energy efficiency and dramatically reduce the number of optical transceivers needed in multi-rack AI scaleup networks.
“The APC CPO specifications address the data-plane integration needed to make native photon routing a practical alternative to electronic data switching,” Shapiro added in Resolight’s statement.
“The easiest to source and the greenest transceiver is the one that you don't need,” Shapiro told us.
He added that if Indium Phosphide supplies were a concern, the sensible response was to “need less of it rather than figure out where do we get more.”
In its "Co-Packaged Optics Informative Outlook and Recommended Practices" document released this week, the APC said, “Without open ecosystem driven standards, the natural gravitational pull is toward vertically integrated proprietary solutions, an outcome that would fragment the market, increase customer lock-in risk, slow adoption, and ultimately diminish the opportunities of innovation for CPO’s technical benefits.”
When it comes to Nanosecond-Level OCS, it said: “The objective is not to standardize a particular fast OCS implementation, but to define the control-plane, optical-interface and behavioral framework that allows fast, transparent OCS to operate as a first-class component of an open AI scale-up fabric.
Earlier this year, Chris Sharp, the chief technology officer at data centre operator Digital Realty, told the BBC, "I think we're at the end of copper" with networking increasingly becoming the key factor slowing down compute.

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