Thursday, 03 April,
14:45
–
15:45
Theater III
Session Description:
Since last year, there have been unprecedented demands for optical interconnect products, especially high-speed optical transceivers. With computing power doubling every 3-4 months, AI computing advances faster than before and may require our industry to evolve much quicker. While AI brings excitement and opportunities to our industry, many challenges exist. Can optical interconnects keep up with AI development? Can existing technologies move fast enough to meet AI requirements? Are disruptive technologies required? Do we need to change the way we develop new technologies and products? This panel will bring together experts from various industry segments, including end users, system vendors, optical transceivers and chip companies, to discuss these questions. This panel intends to have end-users speak loudly; what new optical interface, like CPO, LPO, LRO, etc., will likely take off after n+1 years? What are the essential requirements and deployment issues? How should vendors improve to address those issues? With various products ready, what else must vendors address to keep end-users happy enough to issue PO? Critical questions precisely:
- AI is exploding. Does this also drive Optics to continuously explore and break through its technical boundaries and bottlenecks, such as power consumption, cost, reliability, etc.?
- Which optical technology solution will accelerate the development of large-scale AI clusters, CPOs, LPOs, pluggable modules, or beyond both?
- 800G has been deployed, and pluggable modules have been focused on 1.6T. What is the progress of technologies such as 200G/Lane electrical interface rate? How will these technologies play a leading role in data centers?
- Both CPO and LPO have their advantages but also face various problems. For example, the reliability of CPO needs to consider both testability and serviceability, while the performance of LPO depends too much on adapting the master chip. How do we solve the performance differences between different master chips and different channels?
- When will CPO vs LPO/LRO meaningfully impact Data Center Optical Interconnect?
Organized by: 
Moderator
Frank Chang, Source Photonics, United States
About Frank Chang:
Frank Chang is a leading expert in photonic integrated circuit (IC) technologies, optics transceivers, and optical networking. He currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Source Photonics, focusing on advanced and next-generation transceiver design. Before this, he was a Senior Principal Engineer for Optics Interconnect at Inphi Corporation for six years, following over twelve years at Vitesse Semiconductors. Additionally, Frank has held various project and management positions at Cisco/Pirelli and JDS Uniphase, where he worked on the design, development, and commercialization of fiber optics components. Recently, he published the first industry book on data center interconnects, titled "Datacenter Connectivity Technologies: Principles and Practice." He is a frequent speaker at conferences and has authored four books, as well as co-authored over 100 journal and conference papers. Frank has served on the technical committees for ECOC and OFC for many consecutive years. He was the president of the Photonic Society of Chinese-Americans (PSC) and is currently a member of its board and advisory committee. Furthermore, he has been the Industry Forum & Exhibition Chair for Globecom in 2015 (San Diego), 2019 (Hawaii), and will be for ICC 2024 (Denver) with the IEEE Communication Society. Frank earned his Ph.D. in Optoelectronics from the École Polytechnique at the University of Montreal, Canada, where his research focused on the ultrafast optical generation of 1550 nm tunable solid-state lasers.
Panelists
Nan Ge, Meta, United States
About Nan Ge:
Nan Ge is a Technical Sourcing Manager at Meta, specializing in network systems and interconnects for large-scale data center infrastructure. With over a decade of experience in strategic sourcing and hardware design, Nan has driven advancements in high-performance network and interconnect solutions at Meta, Microsoft, and Dell. He holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Electromechanical Engineering. As an inventor with five patents and over 20 publications, Nan successfully bridged multidisciplinary innovations into industrial applications across computing, power, and microbial technologies at various research institutes and startups early in his career.
Sun Min, Tencent, China
About Sun Min:
Sun Min earned his Ph.D. from Nanjing University, specializing in Microelectronics and Solid-State Electronics. He joined Huawei's “2012-Lab” after graduating in 2013. Since 2018, he has served as the Chief Engineer of interconnect hardware in the Tencent Network Platform Department. His main focus is on next-generation optoelectronic chips and components, non-hermetic package technology, optoelectronic integration in consumer products, and data center system architecture. Over the past ten years, he has participated in and led several national projects. Additionally, he has been a guest professor at Shandong University since 2022.
Anbin Wang, Alibaba Group, China
About Anbin Wang:
Anbin Wang is a Ph.D. graduate from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), where he studied high-speed optical communication. Before joining Alibaba, he worked at Finisar, where he built a team focused on developing high-speed transceivers and active optical cables (AOC). At Alibaba, his team successfully developed the 200G SR4, 400G VR4, and 400G DR4 for high-volume deployment. They continue to work on the development of the 800G VR8, 800G DR8, and 1.6T transceivers while studying various optical interconnect technologies, including Co-Packaged Optics (CPO), Laser-Powered Optics (LPO), and Laser-Remoted Optics (LRO) for data centers.
Scott Wilkinson, Cignal AI, United States
About Scott Wilkinson:
Scott Wilkinson has over 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. As the Lead Analyst for Optical Components at Cignal AI, he conducts both quantitative and qualitative research on the optical components market. Dr. Wilkinson has held senior positions in product management, technical marketing, and systems engineering at companies such as Hitachi, ECI Telecom, MRV, Fujitsu, Kestrel Solutions, and Parama Networks. He is a well-regarded speaker at telecom conferences and events and often contributes to trade publications. Additionally, he is the author of “Telecommedy.” Dr. Wilkinson earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Jianying Zhou, Hisense Broadband, United States
About Jianying Zhou:
Dr. Jianying Zhou currently serves as the Vice President of Technology at Hisense Broadband Inc. He previously held the position of Director of R&D and Principal Engineer at Intel and has worked in various professional roles at NeoPhotonics, Oclaro, Finisar, AZNA, Sycamore, Nortel, and JDS. With 30 years of experience in the photonics and optical communication industry, he has led technology and product development initiatives. Dr. Zhou has made significant contributions in fields such as silicon photonics, integrated photonic transceivers, and emerging photonic technologies. He has authored 15 technical papers, including invited talks at the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) Conference and IEEE Summer Topics, as well as invited papers in the Journal of Lightwave Technology (JLT) and IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics (JSTQE). He earned his Ph.D. from Peking University and was awarded a grant from the ICTP Program under the United Nations in 1992.