Industry-first partially retimed 800G optical transceivers for AI/ML workloads

Lessengers Inc. has announced a comprehensive portfolio of 800G optics designed for AI/ML workloads in hyperscale data centres. The company is adding partially retimed capability to its 800G transceiver product portfolio, which, in one product, entails an integrated DSP chip on the transmitter side.

This capability will allow a wide range of interoperability with other pluggable transceivers and lower power consumption due to the use of a half retimer.

The company's AI/ML product now features a linear pluggable optics (LPO); and half-retimed linear optics (HALO) or linear receive optics (LRO).

The Transceiver now offers less than 9W for an 800G (2 × SR4) OSFP and is IEEE 802.3 and CMIS 5.0 or later compliant. It provides 8 × 112Gb/s PAM4 on the electrical host receiver and optical line transmitter interfaces. A half retimer chip is integrated in the transmit path from the electrical input to the optical line side output for enhanced signal retiming and equalisation.

The company's products are based on its patented DOW technology, a polymer-based air-cladded waveguide technology that is especially useful for optical interconnects in the data centre and high-performance computing environments.

"Demand for 800G SR8 transceivers exceeded all expectations in 2023, and more than three million units of these modules will be shipped in 2024," commented Dr. Vladimir Kozlov, CEO and founder of LightCounting Market Research. "Improvements in power efficiency of optical transceivers are critical for scaling AI clusters from tens of thousands of GPUs now to hundreds of thousands in 2025-2026. All solutions, including LPO and HALO designs, are being evaluated by the leading customers for future deployments."

"We are excited to demonstrate at OFC our latest advances in the field of 800G optics, which will be crucial to improving the processing of AI/ML workloads," said Chongcook Kim, CEO at Lessengers. "We look forward to working with our partners and customers throughout the hyperscale and supercomputing ecosystems in order to realise these gains."

The company is exhibiting at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference, March 26-28, 2024, in booth 5200.