Open Eye MSA consortium aims to enable PAM-4 interconnects scaling from 50Gbps to 400Gbps

The Open Eye Consortium announced the establishment of its Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) outlining its mission to standardize advanced specifications for lower latency, more power efficient and lower cost optical modules targeting 50Gbps, 100Gbps, 200Gbps, and up to 400Gbps optical modules for data center interconnects over single-mode and multimode fiber.

The MSA aims to accelerate the adoption of PAM-4 optical interconnects scaling to 50Gbps, 100Gbps, 200Gbps, and 400Gbps by expanding upon existing standards to enable optical module implementations using less complex, lower cost, lower power, and optimized clock and data recovery (CDR) based architectures in addition to existing digital signal processing (DSP) architectures.

Minimizing the need for digital signal processing in optical modules has many advantages including significantly lowering latency, power consumption and cost.

The Open Eye industry consortium is committed to investing its collective innovation and engineering resources for the development of an industry-standard optical interconnect that leverages seamless component interoperability among a broad group of industry-leading technology providers, including providers of electronics, lasers and optical components.

“LightCounting forecasts that sales of next-generation Ethernet products will exceed $500 million in 2020,” said Dale Murray, Principal Analyst at LightCounting.

“However, this is only possible if suppliers can meet customer requirements for cost and power consumption. The new Open Eye MSA addresses both of these critical requirements. Having low latency is an extra bonus that HPC and AI applications will benefit from.”

The Open Eye MSA consortium’s approach is a natural evolution relative to today’s high-volume optical nodes, enabling users to scale to next generation baud rates.

The initial Open Eye MSA specification will focus on 53Gbps per lane PAM-4 solutions for 50G SFP, 100G DSFP, 100G SFP-DD, 200G QSFP, and 400G QSFP-DD and OSFP single-mode modules. Subsequent specifications will aim to address multimode and 100Gbps per lane applications.

MACOM and Semtech Corporation initiated the formation of the Open Eye MSA with 19 current members in Promoter and Contributing membership classes.

Promoters include Applied Optoelectronics Inc., Cambridge Industries (CIG), Color Chip, Juniper Networks, Luxshare-ICT, MACOM, Mellanox, Molex, and Semtech Corporation.

Contributors include: Accelink, Cloud Light Technology, InnoLight, Keysight Technologies, Maxim Integrated, O-Net, Optomind, Source Photonics, and Sumitomo Electric.

“Through its participation in the Open Eye MSA, AOI is leveraging our laser and optical module technology to deliver benefits of low cost, high-speed connectivity to next generation data centers,” said David (Chan Chih) Chen, AVP, Strategic Marketing for Transceiver at AOI.

“As one of the earliest promoters of this technology, we had a live module demo at OFC2019. With the recent acquisition of Lumentum/Oclaro’s data center product portfolios, CIG is expanding its product offering for both telecom and datacom markets. Our participation in the Open Eye MSA will enable us to apply this expertise to serve our customers with lower power and lower cost transceivers,” said Michael Xin, VP of Sales and Marketing at CIG.

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