1. PhoxTroTPhotonics for High-Performance, Low-Cost & Low-Energy Data Centers,
High Performance Computing Systems: Terabit/s Optical Interconnect Technologies
for On-Board, Board-to-Board, Rack-to-Rack Data Links
NEWSLETTER
Number 5
March 2016
OFC 2016 - Special Edition
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the fifth edition of the PhoxTroT newsletter!
In our final year of this European flagship project, PhoxTroT will be presented at various
exhibitions and fairs. This edition of our newsletter is focused on the activities during the
Optical Fiber Conference 2016. This year’s OFC takes place from the 20th to 24th March in
Anaheim, California. PhoxTroT will be among the exhibitors at the conference where our latest
achievements will be presented. This document contains a short description of the
demonstrators which will be shown at the fair.
We are looking forward to meet you.
@ Exhibition
The PhoxTroT team will be welcoming you at the booth #3104.
PhoxTroT Vision
2. PhoxTroT Newsletter No.5 March 2016
2
Optically enabled SAS data storage system
Optically enabled SAS data storage system to demonstrate optical disaggregation of SAS
devices.
Thunder Valley 2
One of the early achievements during the PhoxTroT project was the successful development by
Seagate of a fully optically enabled data storage switch platform, in which all internal high
speed Serial Attached SCSI links were implemented optically.
This required the deployment of board-mounted optical transceivers and the development of a
proprietary electro-optical midplane, pluggable optical drive connectors and interface cards for
hard disk drives.
The system was fully characterized and validated with all disk drives detectable over the high-
speed optical SAS links and all SAS links have been verified with a BER of less than 10-15
.
3. PhoxTroT Newsletter No.5 March 2016
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Electro/Optical PCB - 16L+1O
Electro/Optical PCB with 16 copper layers and single embedded multimode polymer optical
waveguide layer in the stack center.
TTM Technologies has developed an opto-board supporting two Compass Networks ASICs
with on-chip optical interconnects, residing 15cm apart. The ASICs implement a router traffic
manger including a switch fabric, queuing manager and egress processing.
Each ASIC has 2D on-chip VCSEL and PD matrices, flipchip assembled directly on the digital
CMOS. The chips are located so that the VCSEL matrix on one chip faces the PD matrix on the
other with 14 multimode polymer waveguides connecting each router matrix.
Optically enabled switch controller module
Converged photonic data centre system to demonstrate optically disaggregated PhoxTroT
object oriented architecture.
Seagate have developed an optically enabled, object oriented data storage switch system to
demonstrate optically disaggregated object oriented architecture for future exascale data
centres. Part of the system on display is the Ethernet switch controller module with
interchangeable optical transceiver mezzanine slots, allowing different midboard transceiver
modules to be interchanged on the same board without a change to the design. An MXC
interface will allow direct high bandwidth optical connection to the system end nodes.
