Need for Speed - Update 400 & 800 Gigabit Ethernet

No one today will be surprised to hear that data volumes are increasing all around the world. Data is coming into the focus of attention in every sector worldwide and is becoming more important than ever due to increasing levels of digitalization. Thus, according to Statista, the annual digital data volume in 2025 will amount to 175 zettabytes. At the same time, because the data is processed and exchanged centrally in datacenters, the need for capacity in these facilities is also increasing.

Ethernet Roadmap: 400 Gigabit and 800 Gigabit applications

In order to achieve the highest possible data rates, many datacenter operators are already using 400 Gigabit Ethernet networks. These are the focus of the current blog article At the same time, developments are already moving in the direction of even faster, optical data transmission solutions. The OSFP MSA is dedicating considerable effort to further developing the OSFP transceiver for 800 Gigabit applications such as 800G-DR8. In this solution, the 800 GBit/s data transfer is performed over eight parallel full-duplex 100-Gbit transmission channels (lanes) with PAM4 coding (8x100G=800G) and two possible reaches: one up to 2km and the other up to 10km. The following connector faces are possible: Singlemode MPO/MTP^® 16 APC 8°, Singlemode MDC or Singlemode SN PC 0°.

Market researchers and transceiver manufacturers agree that the strongest growth in the singlemode sector in the coming years will be seen by the 400GBASE-FR4 (for paths of up to 2km) and 400GBASE-DR4 (for paths of up to 500m) transmission methods, which have been standardised in accordance with IEEE 802.3bs. The future in the 400G multimode sector quite clearly belongs to 400GBASE-SR8

All the above-mentioned topics and other transmission methods for 400G datacenter networks, such as 400GBASE-FR4 or 400GBASE-SR 4.2 (BiDi), can also be seen in the video: