Recently, IPEC (International Optoelectronic Commission) officially released the industry's first "100 Gbit/s/Lane-based 100 Gbit/s and 400 Gbit/s PAM4 Optical Module Test Specifications" (hereinafter referred to as "Test Specifications"), the test specifications by Led by the IPEC test group, with the participation of several member units such as China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Accelerator, Huawei, Source, ZTE, YOFC, etc., it aims to provide a test basis for the evolution of data center networks to 400GE and help many optical module manufacturers in the industry chain. and its customers identify potential interoperability problems and risks in advance, and accelerate the process of large-scale commercial use.
In recent years, the data center market has continued to maintain rapid growth. A large number of new and reconstructed data centers have stimulated the market demand for optical modules, and the market scale has continued to expand. The rate of optical modules used in data centers is evolving from 100G to 400G. According to the analysis of market research agency LightCounting, cloud service companies and large data centers (DCs) are the first to start the transition to 400G, and they have begun to apply them in 2019. 400G is expected to dominate the data center market by 2023.
In the current 400GE optical modules, 4*106Gbps PAM4 (400G-DR4, FR4, LR4) are mainly used on the optical port side to realize 400G signal transmission, and 8*53Gbps PAM4 or 4*106Gbps PAM4 are used on the electrical port side. Electrical signals, in the form of OSFP or QSFP-DD. In comparison, QSFP-DD has a smaller package size (similar to the QSFP28 package of traditional 100G optical modules) and is more suitable for data center applications.
400GE optical modules, as the key hardware for the interconnection of optical networks within the data center that will be commercialized on a large scale, require the industry to jointly build an open platform for comprehensive verification. For this reason, the IPEC International Optoelectronics Committee officially launched the interoperability test standard project for 400G Ethernet optical modules in April 2021, aiming to create an open interoperability platform for 400GE to become commercial and mature; in order to promote the research process of the open platform, in September of the same year , IPEC and a number of member units jointly demonstrated the 400GE optical module interoperability test Demo based on the IPEC test group's self-developed test platform at the Shenzhen Optical Expo; this time, IPEC officially released the test specification, which is the industry's first 400GE optical module. The standard specification of module interoperability test hopes to provide a favorable basis for the industry chain to improve and optimize the interoperability performance, so as to accelerate the mature and large-scale commercial deployment of the 400GE industry chain.
