Chuck Mattera, former chairman and CEO of Coherent, a major optoelectronics company, pointed out that as optics continues to deepen into the AI computing architecture, the next stage of the industry still needs to be jointly promoted by industry players. (Photo by reporter Fang Weijie)
[Reporter Fang Weijie/Taipei Report] Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure continues to expand, Chuck, former chairman and CEO of Coherent, a major optoelectronics company Mattera pointed out that AI is not just a software transformation, but also an infrastructure revolution. As the scale of computing expands from chips, servers, and cabinets to entire buildings and even campuses, data movement has become a new limiting factor, driving optical technology to continue to move closer to the computing core. 1.6T optical products are entering the mass-scale stage, 3.2T transceivers have also been demonstrated, and co-packaged optics (CPO) has moved out of the laboratory.
Mattera, formerly the chairman and CEO of Coherent, recently gave a speech titled "The Century of Photons." He said that behind AI is actually a huge physical machine. The computing units are no longer just chips, servers or cabinets, but have gradually expanded to buildings and even entire campuses, requiring 100,000-level accelerators, liquid cooling systems and millions of optical connections. At this scale, computing, memory, power, cooling and connections have become five equally important systems. When computing reaches the scale of a building, the interconnection itself becomes part of the architecture.
Mattera pointed out that each computing era has different limiting factors. In the 1990s, the industry pursued clock speeds until heat dissipation caused limitations; in the 2000s, transistor density continued to increase, and in the 2010s, it faced memory bandwidth pressure. After that, packaging and data movement gradually came under pressure. Now the bottleneck has shifted to the interconnect again. Power consumption, bandwidth, latency and transmission distance must be solved at the same time. "Mobile data has now become a new limiting factor."
However, Mattera emphasized that this is not a competition between electrons and photons. "Electrons are responsible for calculation and photons are responsible for transmission." The future will be an engineering integration of the two. In the past 50 years, optical fiber has solved the problem of long-distance transmission across oceans, continents, cities and data centers. Now the optical transmission distance has been shortened to 1 kilometer, 10 meters, 1 meter, 1 centimeter, and even millimeter scale. As the bandwidth increases, copper wires face power consumption, heat dissipation and delay pressure, which promotes optics to continue to move closer to the computing end.
In terms of technology roadmap, Mattera said that pluggable optical modules (Pluggable), near-package optics (Near-Package Optics), co-packaged optics and optical input and output (Optical I/O) are evolving in the same direction, but different architectures are not simply replacing each other; pluggable solutions will continue to be upgraded, near-package optics play a connecting role, and jointly packaged optics are further integrated, while optical input and output bring light closer to the computing core, each responding to the needs of higher bandwidth, lower power consumption, lower heat, and shorter latency.
Mattera also proposed four signals that industry transformation is accelerating, including that 1.6T optical products are entering the mass-scale stage, and 3.2T transceivers using 400G optical channels have been demonstrated; pluggable optics continue to expand; co-packaged optics have left the laboratory, and related platforms have begun to ship; in addition, optical components are moved to application special integrated circuits (ASICs). Compared with traditional pluggable solutions, optical interconnection power consumption can be reduced by about 70%. He bluntly said, "This transformation is no longer just a prediction, it is happening."
