Photonic computing company Lightmatter has unveiled Guide DR, a liquid-cooled laser network interface card (LNIC) that will help to scale co-packaged optics (CPO).
Announced last week (May 21), Lightmatter said the modular LNIC has been specifically designed to support high-bandwidth optical interconnects, including Lightmatter’s own Passage L20 offering, which was released in March of this year.
– Charlotte Trueman
By relocating the light source from the faceplate into the chassis, Lightmatter said the Guide DR LNIC solves the faceplate scaling bottleneck that will increasingly be caused by front-panel pluggable external lasers in AI data centers.
Built to OCP Nic 3.0 dimensions, the company further claimed that the LNIC quadruples optical power density when compared to conventional External Laser Small Form Factor Pluggables (ELSFPs), supporting up to 51.2Tbps of aggregate CPO or NPO (near-packaged optics) scale-up bandwidth, with four Guide DR modules able to support up to 204.8Tbps of CPO scale-up switching bandwidth in a single 1 RU switch tray.
