Marvell Technology, Inc. announced Spica Gen2-T, the industry's first 5nm 800 Gbps transmit-only PAM4 optical DSP. Designed for transmit retimed optical modules (TRO modules), Spica Gen2-T can reduce the power consumption of 800 Gbps optical modules by more than 40%1 while maintaining interoperability with conventional optical modules and IEEE 802.3 compliant host devices. Escalating cloud and AI compute demands are driving service providers to expand the breadth and capacity of their optical interconnect networks and adopt higher-bandwidth optical modules so they can connect a growing number of accelerators into a single logical compute node.

With some AI clusters requiring tens of thousands of connections, higher optical interconnect efficiency is critical. To enable cloud service providers to optimize their infrastructure, Marvell has reduced power per bit and cost per bit with every generation of optical DSPs. Additionally, Marvell develops DSPs fine-tuned for specific operating characteristics, emerging use cases and/or new classes of modules such as TRO to serve the broadening spectrum of link types and use cases, compatible with existing industry standards to ensure full interoperability.

TRO modules use transmit-only DSPs to digitize, process, equalize, and amplify data from host devices, performing electrical-to-optical conversion on the egress path; and use TIAs only to perform the optical-to-electrical conversion on the ingress path. TROs with transmit-only DSPs can reduce power consumption yet maintain the auto adaptation and compensation capability to minimize part-to-part, system-to-system variation when deployed in scale, which has become critical for large AI system deployment. Notable features of Spica Gen2-T include: Enables <8W 800G transmit retimed optical (TRO) module, Supports 1x800G, 2x400G, 8x100G connectivity, Supports independent lane operation, IEEE, MSA and CMIS compliant DSP that supports all 200G/400G/800G applications, Low-power transmit path-only DSP with integrated laser drivers for a wide range of optics, Advanced diagnostic feature for link monitoring.