What are the industry’s technical experts in pluggable optics thinking about today? What are the technical boundaries that the smartest minds are pushing past to make the next generation of high speed optics? In episode 6, we continue a conversation with my esteemed colleague, Mark Nowell. In this second part of our four-part conversation we delve into thermal considerations, which he’s been thinking and writing about lately.

Mark Nowell is a Cisco Fellow in Cisco’s Optics and Optical Systems Group. His focus is on next generation interconnect technology innovation to meet Cisco's needs. Mark is also active within the industry standards and forums and has chaired multiple IEEE 802.3 Ethernet projects. He represents Cisco on various industry alliances and consortiums. Mark also chairs a number of industry Multi-source Agreement groups focusing on next generation optical module form factors such as QSFP-DD and QSFP-DD800, and optical interface signaling technology like the 100G Lambda MSA.

QSFP-DD Whitepaper, “Optimizing QSFP-DD Systems to Achieve at Least 25 Watt Thermal Port Performance”

http://www.qsfp-dd.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2021-QSFP-DD-MSA-Thermal-Whitepaper-Final.pdf

Additional resources

Cisco Optics blogs: https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/ciscoopticsblog (subscribe at https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=CiscoOpticsBlog )

Cisco Optics YouTube playlist: http://cs.co/9008BlQen

Cisco Optics landing page: cisco.com/go/optics

Timestamps

2:20 Thermals and cooling of modules

3:21 Why it’s an issue

4:20 A consequence of leaf-spine data center architecture

6:10 ASIC driving large number of ports

6:49 The problem for optics

7:28 Comparison with 10G ports in the past

8:26 A module the size of a laptop

10:31 Single 400G form factor for both service providers and webscale data centers

12:33 Advanced technology in single common 400G form factor

14:00 Comparison with 10G

16:01 Backward compatibility of form factors

Music credits

Sunny Morning by FSM Team | https://www.free-stock-music.com/artist.fsm-team.html

Upbeat by Mixaund | https://mixaund.bandcamp.com