SC Conference - Activity Details

Paul Duran  (Luxtera)

Storage Solutions and Cables

Thursday,  11:30AM - 12:00PM

Room 12A/12B

IT managers are faced with tradeoffs between performance, operational expenditures, and capital expenditures when selecting connectivity solutions for datacenters. Today's connectivity options include copper cables, copper active cables, and optical modules. The advantage of copper cables is that they are lower in cost but at the same time they have major performance limitations in term of reach and size. Active copper cables only slightly increase performance of copper and they are still reach-constrained limited at higher data rates such as 10 gigabits. Fiber and optical modules offer the best performance but are still very costly at 10 gigabit data rates. This presentation will introduce the concept of Silicon Photonics enabled optical active cables and explore the advantages of this technology over traditional solutions for datacenter connectivity.