- Ciena unveiled its Vesta 200 6.4T CPX co-packaged optics engine, touting vendor interoperability and reduced power consumption
- This is Ciena’s first new product since it acquired Nubis Communications
- Co-packaged optics has yet to fully take off, so Ciena is trying to make adoption “as simple as possible,” said analyst Jack Gold
Ciena looks to accelerate co-packaged optics (CPO) adoption with a new pluggable product that it claims can help hyperscalers and cloud providers drastically reduce power consumption for AI workloads.
Dubbed Vesta 200 6.4T CPX, Ciena’s pluggable optical engine is presented as an “open, multi-vendor ecosystem,” meaning it’s interoperable across multiple Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), optical and electrical interconnect providers. The product can support scale-up and scale-out networks on 200G per lane switches, XPU servers and space-constrained network interface controllers (NICs).
CPO is a technology that places optics and electronics closer together in a switching or processing system, enabling increased network density, higher data processing speeds and improved power efficiency.
Ciena claimed the engine can reduce power consumption by up to 70%, because it can support an electrical loss budget (i.e., allowable signal loss) of up to 20 decibels from the host ASIC.
The CPO engine marks Ciena’s first product introduction since it acquired Nubis Communications in September. Nubis specialized in 6.4 Tbps-capable optical modules and technology to improve copper cable performance in data centers.
Ciena touts answer to data center copper constraints
Data centers use a lot of copper for cabling, power systems and liquid cooling setups, but AI and high-performance computing call for replacing that copper for high bandwidth, low latency optical connectivity.
“Ciena is trying to make this as simple as possible for its customers, and [this] should help it expand its markets,” said J.Gold Associates Principal Jack Gold told Fierce.
“But it’s not a simple process to reconfigure upscale connectivity in data centers, as taking machines offline to do upgrades affects the overall data center capabilities for customers,” he explained. “Anything that makes this simpler, like pluggable optics connections, will benefit upgrade efforts.”
Despite the potential CPO holds, the technology has yet to fully take off. Helen Xenos, Ciena senior director of Portfolio Marketing, said current CPO approaches are hampered by vendor lock-in for both the ASIC and optical engine and “limited architectural flexibility,” where users must decide upfront whether their system will rely on optical or electrical interconnect.
Serviceability is another concern, where “a failure in a single optical engine can impact the entire network node,” she said.
Co-packaged optics state of play
Ciena’s not the only one pushing for CPO. Nvidia last year introduced co-packaged Spectrum-X and Quantum-X silicon photonics networking switches, designed to reduce power used by the transceivers running between GPUs.
Corning, which sees CPO as pivotal in addressing data center copper constraints, told Fierce in December it’s “engaged in cutting-edge research with co-packaged optics and glass substrates for opto-electronic circuits, and we see tremendous potential for this technology.”
When will CPO deployments get off the ground? LightCounting predicts the market for CPO combined with Ethernet optical transceivers will reach $26 billion in 2026, and that the first CPO deployments will take place in smaller AI clusters by “companies willing to take more risk.”
But the tech won’t get higher traction unless one of the major cloud companies gives the “green light,” wrote LightCounting CEO Vladimir Koslov in a blog.
“Meta is clearly looking at Broadcom’s solutions very closely. Microsoft and Oracle have installed many of the fully integrated systems from Nvidia,” he said. “If one of these comes with CPO at some point, they may not even notice.”