i cant help it but this is excitng,They won’t become predominant until electrical alternatives fail, and that won’t happen anytime soon,” he said.
More recently, a panel of industry experts met at DesignCon 2015 to discuss the topic “Will the Optical Backplane Ever Happen?” Rick Merritt, UBM, EETimes, captured these comments from the panelists:
- The optical backplane of the future is still a far future dream. Optics are superior to copper in reach, enabling a larger chassis, but “optics have not demonstrated power efficiency – you waste all the energy in optoelectronic conversions,” said Hong Liu, a Principal Engineer in Google’s platform group.
- “The feasibility of cost-effective manufacturing is highly unlikely in the short term,” said J. Balachandran, a senior Cisco Systems engineer. Dense wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) will open a door to 100x greater I/O density in systems, a capability that eventually will make a move to optical backplanes inevitable. “That will change the system architecture radically, but there are still a lot of factors to solve, and cost is a key one,” he added.
- Ed Priest, a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks, predicted a switch to optical backplanes could come at 200G data rates, two major generations from now. “What’s finally going to tip it is …[at some point the SERDES] won’t fit on the ASIC anymore, and once [that happens] you can design a new custom I/O chip that opens [the system] up to optics,” Priest said. “I’m pretty convinced at 100G [serial rates the electronics] will work, but at 200G I don’t know yet,” he said.
- “I predict the percent of optical backplanes will continue to grow, but very slowly,” said John Monson, VP of sales at SERDES designer MoSys. “They won’t become predominant until electrical alternatives fail, and that won’t happen anytime soon,” he said.
These experts are from the telecom and datacom industries, so their comments must be taken from that perspective. The computercom industry has not been able to fully leverage optical connectivity, and thus is under a different set of pressure points to make decisions perhaps a bit sooner.
