Posts Tagged 'data center interconnect'
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October 14, 2025
AI Scale Up Goes for Distance with 9-meter 800G AEC from Infraeo and Marvell
By Winnie Wu, Senior Director Product Marketing at Marvell
Welcome to the beginning of row-scale computing.
At the 2025 OCP Global Summit, Marvell and Infraeo will showcase a breakthrough in high-speed interconnect technology — a 9-meter active electrical cable (AEC) capable of transmitting 800G across standard copper. The demonstration will take place in the Marvell booth #B1.
This latest innovation brings data center architecture one step closer to full row-scale AI system design, allowing copper connections that stretch across seven racks - that’s nearly the length of a standard 10-rack row. It builds on the prior achievement by Marvell of a 7-meter AEC demonstrated at OFC 2025, pushing high-speed copper technology even further beyond what was thought possible.
Pushing the Boundaries of Copper
Until now, copper connections in large-scale AI systems have been limited by reach. Traditional electrical cables lose signal quality as distance increases, restricting system architects to a few meters between servers or racks. The 9-meter AEC changes that equation.
By combining high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) with advanced noise reduction and signal integrity engineering, the new design extends copper’s effective range well beyond conventional limits, maintaining clean, low-latency data transfer over distances once thought achievable only with optical fiber.
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October 07, 2025
Faster, Farther and Going Optical: How PCIe Is Accelerating the AI Revolution
By Annie Liao, Product Management Director, ODSP Marketing, Marvell
For over 20 years, PCIe, or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, has been the dominant standard to connect processors, NICs, drives and other components within servers thanks to the low latency and high bandwidth of the protocol as well as the growing expertise around PCIe across the technology ecosystem. It will also play a leading role in defining the next generation of computing systems for AI through increases in performance and combining PCIe with optics.
Here’s why:
PCIe Transitions Are Accelerating
Seven years passed between the debut of PCIe Gen 3 (8 gigatransfers/second—GT/s) in 2010 and the release of PCIe Gen 4 (16 GT/sec) in 2017.1 Commercial adoption, meanwhile, took closer to a full decade2
Toward a terabit (per second): PCIe standards are being developed and adopted at a faster rate to keep up with the chip-to-chip interconnect speeds needed by system designers.
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April 17, 2025
Advancing Optics with a Hybrid Route to TIAs
By Nicola Bramante, Senior Principal Engineer
Transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) are one of the unsung heroes of the cloud and AI era.
At the recent OFC 2025 event in San Francisco, exhibitors demonstrated the latest progress on 1.6T optical modules featuring Marvell 200G TIAs. Recognized by multiple hyperscalers for its superior performance, Marvell 200G TIAs are becoming a standard component in 200G/lane optical modules for 1.6T deployments.
TIAs capture incoming optical signals from light detectors and transform the underlying data to be transmitted between and used by servers and processors in data centers and scale-up and scale-out networks. Put another way, TIAs allow data to travel from photons to electrons. TIAs also amplify the signals for optical digital signal processors, which filter out noise and preserve signal integrity.
And they are pervasive. Virtually every data link inside a data center longer than three meters includes an optical module (and hence a TIA) at each end. TIAs are critical components of fully retimed optics (FRO), transmit retimed optics (TRO) and linear pluggable optics (LPO), enabling scale-up servers with hundreds of XPUs, active optical cables (AOC), and other emerging technologies, including co-packaged optics (CPO), where TIAs are integrated into optical engines that can sit on the same substrates where switch or XPU ASICs are mounted. TIAs are also essential for long-distance ZR/ZR+ interconnects, which have become the leading solution for connecting data centers and telecom infrastructure. Overall, TIAs are a must have component for any optical interconnect solution and the market for interconnects is expected to triple to $11.5 billion by 2030, according to LightCounting.
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March 17, 2025
The evolution of AI interconnects
By Nick Kucharewski, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, Marvell
The rapid expansion in the size and capacity of AI workloads is significantly impacting both computing and network technologies in the modern data center. Data centers are continuously evolving to accommodate higher performance GPUs and AI accelerators (XPUs), increased memory capacities, and a push towards lower latency architectures for arranging these elements. The desire for larger clusters with shorter compute times has driven heightened focus on networking interconnects, with designers embracing state-of-the-art technologies to ensure efficient data movement and communication between the components comprising the AI cloud.
A large-scale AI cloud data center can contain hundreds of thousands, or millions, of individual links between the devices performing compute, switching, and storage functions. Inside the cloud, there is a tightly ordered fabric of high-speed interconnects: webs of copper wire and glass fiber each carrying digital signals at roughly 100 billion bits per second. Upon close inspection there is a pattern and a logical ordering to each link used for every connection in the cloud, which can be analyzed by considering the physical attributes of different types of links.
For inspiration, we can look back 80 years to the origins of modern computing, when John von Neumann posed the concept of memory hierarchy for computer architectures1. In 1945 Von Neumann proposed a smaller faster storage memory placed close to the compute circuitry, and a larger slower storage medium placed further away, to enable a system delivering both performance and scale. This concept of memory hierarchy is now pervasive, with the terms “Cache”, “DRAM”, and “Flash” part of our everyday language. In today’s AI cloud data centers, we can analyze the hierarchy of interconnects in much the same way. It is a layered structure of links, strategically utilized according to their innate physical attributes of speed, power consumption, reach, and cost.
The hierarchy of interconnects
This hierarchy of interconnects provides a framework for understanding emerging interconnect technologies and to assess their potential impact in the next generation of AI data centers. Through a discussion of the basic attributes of emerging interconnect technologies in the context of the goals and aims of the AI cloud design, we can estimate how these technologies may be deployed in the coming years. By identifying the desired attributes for each use case, and the key design constraints, we can also predict when new technologies will pass the "tipping point" enabling widespread adoption in future cloud deployments.
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September 25, 2024
Marvell COLORZ 800 Named Most Innovative Product at ECOC 2024
By Michael Kanellos, Head of Influencer Relations, MarvellWith AI computing and cloud data centers requiring unprecedented levels of performance and power, Marvell is leading the way with transformative optical interconnect solutions for accelerated infrastructure to meet the rising demand for network bandwidth.
At the ECOC 2024 Exhibition Industry Awards event, Marvell received the Most Innovative Pluggable Transceiver/Co-Packaged Module Award for the Marvell® COLORZ® 800 family. Launched in 2020 for ECOC’s 25th anniversary, the ECOC Exhibition Industry Awards spotlight innovation in optical communications, transport, and photonic technologies. This recognition highlights the company’s innovations in ZR/ZR+ technology for accelerated infrastructure and demonstrates its critical role in driving cloud and AI workloads.
Recent Posts
- AI Scale Up Goes for Distance with 9-meter 800G AEC from Infraeo and Marvell
- Faster, Farther and Going Optical: How PCIe Is Accelerating the AI Revolution
- Marvell Wins Leading EDGE Award for Ara 1.6T Optical DSP
- Connectivity for AI in the Million XPU Era
- Marvell Ranks on the A-List of CDP Supplier Engagement Leaders
