MACOM Technology Solutions Inc. says it will collaborate with Broadcom on a live demonstration of its linear drive 100 Gbps per lane technology at OFC 2023 in San Diego. The demonstration will leverage MACOM PURE DRIVE transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) and laser drivers and Broadcom’s Tomahawk 5 switch chip and can be seen both at MACOM’s Booth 3927 and Broadcom’s Booth 6425 from March 7-9.
Linear drive architectures obviate the need for a DSP in pluggable optical modules, thus lowering power consumption, improving signal latency, and reducing cost, asserts MACOM. The switch ASIC consolidates the DSP function while the linear laser drivers and linear TIAs provide the compensation required for electro-optic conversion.
“The MACOM PURE DRIVE chipset is specifically designed to provide leading high-performance linear compensation, enabling the linear drive architecture,” said Ryan Latchman, vice president, high-performance connectivity product marketing, at MACOM. “These are exciting results, and we are pleased to share our linear drive technology with the industry.”
“The optical networking industry has had a long tradition of optimizing interconnect to reduce latency, power and cost in order to service global needs,” added Peter Del Vecchio, data center switch product manager, Core Switching Group, at Broadcom. “This optimization becomes increasingly important for AI/ML clusters. Our collaboration with MACOM represents an important step in realizing this optimization at 100G/lane leveraging the Tomahawk 5 SerDes capability.”
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