elenion technologies, an innovator in silicon photonic technologies, announced it will demonstrate optical-interconnect-devices (oids) for direct-attach fiber-to-the-server and parallel multi-channel on-board modules for switches during ofc 2017.

developed with elenion’s next-generation photonics platform and packaging technology, this demonstration includes advanced on-board devices with light sources integrated in silicon photonics, enabling scalable on-board solutions that include network-interface-card and switch applications within the data center (dc).

the industry’s increasing need for data transmission is fueled by hyperscale cloud computing, video streaming, social networking, and a growing global internet footprint. the exponential growth in data traffic converges at the data center.

to support this massively aggregated data traffic, dc operators are increasing their use of optics within the dc and are now considering deployment of silicon photonic on-board optics. this will bring optics physically closer to the electronics on the circuit boards and significantly boost performance, power efficiency, reduce cost, and enable new dc architectures and their migration to higher bandwidth.

compared to pluggables, on-board optics offer the advantage of increased switch i/o faceplate bandwidth density, better thermal management, and proximity to switch- or other packet-processing-asics to address signal integrity issues.

“to meet the rapid growth in demand for microsoft azure and our other cloud services, we continue to expand our global cloud infrastructure and believe on-board optics are critical components for next-generation datacenters. we’re extremely pleased by the progress elenion has made to enable cost-effective fiber to the server and large radix switches,” said jeff cox, principal director, network engineering, microsoft corporation.

the elenion platform leverages its proprietary tools to co-design photonics and electronics, industry-standard semiconductor manufacturing tools and materials to achieve high yield, reliability and volume, while driving costs out of the optical packaging.

this ultimately results in integrated photonic circuits with complex functionality in small form factors which simply could never be addressed with discrete devices.