10 Mar 2027
12:30 - 13:30
Expo Theater III
OCP’s Short-Reach Optical Interconnect (SROI) workstream is advancing short-reach optics for scale-up connectivity in AI pods and clusters. Since last year’s OFC panel, it has published its second foundational white paper, defining SROI as a distinct optical reach regime (up to 30 m) and setting system-level requirements for scale-up fabrics, where copper at 200 Gb/s per lane becomes a structural constraint as pods grow to hundreds of accelerators.
This panel turns to the harder question: how does the ecosystem deliver? Panelists will examine the published targets, single-digit pJ/bit per link end, cost per bit trending toward passive copper and semiconductor-grade FIT rates, and debate the choices they force: pluggable versus co-packaged and on-board optics, serviceability versus density, lane-rate flexibility versus supply-chain convergence and resiliency where a single link flap stalls a tightly coupled pod.
The panel will also discuss what comes next. SROI is set to become the Operator Requirements and SROI workstream (WS1) of OCP Networking’s new Integrated Optics (CPO/xPO) subproject, where its requirements anchor work on a foundry-neutral optical chiplet footprint and the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) v2.0 PHY. Beyond copper replacement, panelists will explore what short-reach photonics unlock: disaggregated memory, composable I/O and optically connected chiplets.
Presented By:
