COBO demos packet transmission between On-Board and MSA modules

At this week’s ECOC 2019 in Dublin, the Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) showcased compliance boards built to its recently completed Module Compliance Board (MCB) and Host Compliance Board (HCB) specification. Members also demonstrated the latest developments of optical connectivity solutions for faceplate, backplane, module and co-packaged optics.

Of note, a COBO proof-of-concept switch was demonstrating error-free packet transmission between COBO modules, OSFP modules and QSFP-DD modules. The 400GBASE-SR8 connections were between all module form factors. The OSFP and QSFP-DD modules operated at 10W; whereas, the COBO module had a 30% power savings by operating at under 7W. The ability to place the COBO module closer to the switch ASIC greatly improved the signal integrity performance of the connection permitting the COBO module to use a clock and data recovery (CDR) chip instead of a digital signal processing (DSP) chip.

“Member collaboration has enabled COBO to offer the industry’s first live traffic demonstration of an on-board optics switch based upon COBO’s specification and demonstrating the improved power efficiency of on-board optics,” said Brad Booth, President of COBO.  “COBO members have worked diligently to develop an industry-first specification for on-board optical modules and compliance boards to lower the barrier to entry for implementing on-board optics.”

http://onboardoptics.org