OFC
Dates:
- Technical Conference: 07 – 11 March 2027
- Exhibition: 09 – 11 March 2027
Location: Los Angeles Convention Center | Los Angeles, California, United States
OFC, the premier global event for optical communications and networking, attracts attendees from around the world to a conference and exhibition that showcases the latest industry advancements and emerging technologies.
The Open Compute Project will be at booth S2659 and will have several speaking engagements.
OCP Panel Discussions
Panel 1: Photonics for AI at Scale: Fast, Reliable Light from PICs to Pods to Factories
Building on last year’s OFC panel, “Future Photonics for AI: From PICs to Pods to Factories,” this session will delve into the optical technologies and market dynamics essential for next-generation AI data center infrastructure. The race to exascale AI and beyond continues to drive a fundamental shift in how AI factory building blocks are designed and operated, with photonics as a critical enabler. The future of optical communication must address the most pressing hurdles and bottlenecks, moving beyond traditional electronic interconnects while proving it can be operated dependably at fleet scale.
The OCP proudly brings together a panel of leading experts to discuss the practical realities and future direction of revolutionizing data movement: from photonic integrated circuits (PICs), to scale-up AI pods, to scale-out and -across AI factories. We will examine the most recent breakthroughs in silicon photonics and the maturation of linear-drive and co-packaged optics (CPO), emphasizing their technical and market impact on solving complex data transfer challenges in AI training and inference, and their growing role in enabling next-generation AI accelerators and memory hierarchies.
New this year, the panel will spotlight a question that has moved to the top of every operator’s list: can optics be trusted deep inside the compute fabric? As links multiply into the millions per AI factory, link flaps and transceiver failures translate directly into lost training time. The panel will discuss how the industry is responding — including work in the OCP community, where the Optics Reliability Workstream is developing an enhanced telemetry specification that standardizes link-health metrics, event logging, in-band link-partner visibility, and remote firmware updates for 400G, 800G, and 1.6T transceivers. Panelists will also weigh design-level approaches to engineering out failures, comparing options such as contamination-tolerant expanded beam optics (EBO) connectivity against conventional physical-contact connectors, and debate what it will take to make optical interconnects as dependable as the accelerators they connect.
Planned Panelists:
· Intel
· Ciena
· Oracle
· Arista
· Moderated by LightCounting; Moderator: Daryl Inniss, LightCounting, Principal Market Analyst
Panel 2: AI Scale-up with Short-Reach Optical Interconnects: From Requirements to Reality
The OCP’s Short-Reach Optical Interconnects Initiative (SROI) is advancing the market for short-reach optics, focusing on scale-up connectivity in AI pods and clusters. Following last year’s OFC panel introducing this consensus-based effort, the workstream has now published its second foundational white paper. It defines SROI as a distinct optical reach regime and establishes the system-level requirements for optical adoption in scale-up fabrics, where copper reach at 200 Gb/s lane rates becomes a structural constraint as pods grow from tens to hundreds of accelerators.
With the problem space now defined, this panel turns to the harder question: how does the ecosystem deliver? An expert panel will examine the published targets: energy per link end converging toward single-digit pJ/bit, cost trending toward passive copper on a per-bit basis at the total system level, and hardware reliability approaching semiconductor-grade FIT rates. The panel will also debate the architectural choices they force: pluggable versus co-packaged and on-board integration, serviceability versus density, lane-rate flexibility versus supply chain convergence, and the resiliency techniques needed where a single flap stalls memory-semantic traffic across a tightly coupled pod. The discussion will also look past copper substitution to what compliant short-reach photonics unlock next such as disaggregated memory, composable I/O fabrics, and optically connected chiplets. The session will feature open and frank discussion among the panelists regarding use cases, implementation trade-offs, and recommendations for coordinated standards development.
Planned Panelists from:
· Ayar Labs
· Coherent
· Dell
· Lightmatter
· Moderated by Lightelligence (and co-lead of the OCP SROI workstream) Moderator: Bobby Liu, co-lead of the OCP SROI workstream