09 Mar 2027
16:00 - 17:00
Expo Theater I
Building on last year's OFC panel, "Future Photonics for AI: From PICs to Pods to Factories," this session will delve into the optical technologies and market dynamics essential for next-generation AI data center infrastructure. The race to exascale AI and beyond continues to drive a fundamental shift in how AI factory building blocks are designed and operated, with photonics as a critical enabler. The future of optical communication must address the most pressing hurdles and bottlenecks, moving beyond traditional electronic interconnects while proving it can be operated dependably at fleet scale.
The OCP proudly brings together a panel of leading experts to discuss the practical realities and future direction of revolutionizing data movement: from photonic integrated circuits (PICs), to scale-up AI pods, to scale-out and -across AI factories. We will examine the most recent breakthroughs in silicon photonics and the maturation of linear-drive and co-packaged optics (CPO), emphasizing their technical and market impact on solving complex data transfer challenges in AI training and inference, and their growing role in enabling next-generation AI accelerators and memory hierarchies.
New this year, the panel will spotlight a question that has moved to the top of every operator's list: can optics be trusted deep inside the compute fabric? As links multiply into the millions per AI factory, link flaps and transceiver failures translate directly into lost training time. The panel will discuss how the industry is responding — including work in the OCP community, where the Optics Reliability Workstream is developing an enhanced telemetry specification that standardizes link-health metrics, event logging, in-band link-partner visibility, and remote firmware updates for 400G, 800G, and 1.6T transceivers. Panelists will also weigh design-level approaches to engineering out failures, comparing options such as contamination-tolerant expanded beam optics (EBO) connectivity against conventional physical-contact connectors, and debate what it will take to make optical interconnects as dependable as the accelerators they connect.
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