Broadcom’s Cathy Liu Urges Industry-Wide Collaboration to Tackle 400G Electrical Challenges
At the recent OIF 448G technical session, Cathy Liu, SerDes architect at Broadcom and Vice President of the OIF, emphasized the need for a new model of cross-industry collaboration to address the growing challenges of 400G electrical interfaces in AI-scale data center systems. Liu noted that while earlier generations like 100G and 200G were managed largely through independent vendor optimizations, the leap to 400G demands joint effort across the entire ecosystem—from hyperscalers to chip and connector vendors.
Reflecting on insights from Meta, Google, and leading system vendors like Juniper and Cisco, Liu explained that the current approach of working in silos is no longer sufficient. The industry must adopt joint optimization strategies to overcome issues such as signal integrity, power constraints, and channel feasibility. “The traditional way doesn’t work anymore,” Liu said. “We need end users, equipment vendors, connector suppliers, chip designers, and SerDes IP developers to work together.”
From her SerDes perspective, Liu identified the electrical channel as the most pressing bottleneck in enabling 400G. She called on the community to model real-world channel data and evaluate trade-offs in modulation formats such as PAM4, PAM6, and PAM8. Achieving the right balance between performance and power efficiency will require a holistic, co-optimized design approach that spans multiple layers of the system stack.
Key Points:
- Liu highlighted the need to balance performance, power consumption, and channel feasibility in next-gen designs.
- Cathy Liu stressed the need for collaborative, joint-optimization across the industry to support 400G systems.
- Traditional vendor-specific design approaches used in 100G/200G are insufficient for the 400G era.
- Bandwidth limitations in electrical channels are a primary challenge, driving interest in advanced modulation schemes.
- The OIF is working with system, component, cable, and SerDes vendors to gather data and co-develop viable solutions.
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