This week, Seagate’s Lead Photonics Engineer, Richard Pitwon, has organized and will chair the 2nd Symposium on Optical Interconnect in Data Centres, which is part of the 40th annual European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) taking place 21 – 25 September in Cannes. The symposium focuses on high-performance, low-energy, low cost and small size optical interconnect technologies across the different hierarchical levels of the data centre. Motivated by recent breakthroughs and emerging technologies in short reach optical interconnect and the evolution of data centre architectures, this seminar highlights the latest achievements in optical system solutions and technology.
Photonics is among the key enabling technologies in the evolution of datacom and computer communications. Richard Pitwon will also chair the Short Reach Links conference session on Monday, 22 September and the Subsystems for Networking session on Wednesday, 24 September. At the symposium, Seagate will also present on the next-generation magnetic recording technology, Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR), and its significant areal density improvements and higher linear density.
In addition to the symposium, a joint live demonstration by Seagate, Fraunhofer IZM, ILFA and Anritsu of the System Embedded Photonics in Access Networks (SEPIANet) demonstration platform will take place at the Anritsu booth (stand 379) during ECOC. The demonstration platform consists of an embedded planar glass waveguide optical backplane and pluggable optical interconnect technologies for use in very high-speed data communications systems. As part of the live demonstration, which includes Seagate’s fully optically interconnected 2U24 OneStor™ data storage platform prototype, 32 Gb/s of optical data will be conveyed across the proprietary connector and glass waveguide technologies in the platform and characterised using Anritsu’s BER equipment.
This demonstration platform is the realization of a joint effort between Seagate, Fraunhofer IZM, ILFA Feinstleitertechnik as part of the SEPIANet project. SEPIAnet is an EU funded collaborative research and development project with the goal to develop technological solutions for embedded optical architectures in access network head-end and data centre systems to allow for significant reduction in power requirements, increased energy efficiency, system density and bandwidth scalability.
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