Credo Technology introduced its HiWire Pluggable Patch Panel (HiWire P3) enabling the decoupling of pluggable optics from core switching and routing hardware using Credo’s HiWire Active Electrical Cables (AECs).
The HiWire P3 is a single rack unit (1RU), 32 port QSFP-DD appliance that allows standard pluggable optics to directly connect to an AEC without the use of a switch chip. The HiWire P3 provides power, cooling, and control plane access supporting three important use cases:
- Enabling coherent optics such as ZR+ to be used on lower-cost and smaller buffer switches which may currently lack the power and cooling envelope, or the software required to directly support them.
- Enabling switch and router port speeds to be decoupled from optics speed without having to slow ports down, thereby sacrifice radix and cost, through the use of speed shifting AECs.
- Enabling EDFA amplifiers to be hosted in HiWire P3 ports at lower-cost and lower-power overhead, rather than consuming valuable switch or router ports.
“The HiWire P3 enables complete flexibility in the deployment of modern pluggable optics with new and legacy switches and routers,” said Don Barnetson, Vice President of Product at Credo. “In the HiWire P3, all of the capabilities of the modern pluggable optics are transparently exposed to the user in an open management platform without the increased power, latency, cost and complexity of a switch.”
