Credo, which develops Serializer-Deserializer (SerDes) technology for 100G, 400G, and 800G, has joined the Open Compute Project (OCP).
“As disaggregated chassis begin to displace tradition big-iron switching and routing chassis, low power, highly flexible and routable 400G interconnect becomes a core component of the architecture,” said Don Barnetson, Sr. Director of Product at Credo. “OCP provides a platform to standardize and proliferate 400G disaggregated chassis configurations at hyperscalers around the world.”
Credo is also a member of the HiWire Consortium, announced in September 2019 with 25 other founding members, nearly half of whom are also amongst the OCP ranks. Working in harmony with other standards bodies, the HiWire Consortium is dedicated to the standardization and certification of a new interconnect cable category, Active Electrical Cables (AECs), enabling its broad support and wide industry adoption.
Credo began the development of AECs two years ago to address the obstacles that were slowing the transition to 400G, specifically the performance and physical limitations of copper (DACs) and the power, cost, and availability hurdles of active optical cables (AOCs). AECs integrate retimer and PAM4 to NRZ speedshifting functions with gearbox in-cable making them a lower power, affordable plug and play interconnect for 100G and 400G systems.
Credo says the power, performance, and price of AECs are empowering system architects to rethink the design of next-generation data center configurations, deploy 400G disaggregated chassis and provide a clear path to 800G in the future.
