Ciena has announced Vesta 200 6.4T CPX, which it describes as an ultra-high-density, low-power pluggable co-packaged optics (CPO) solution aimed at removing barriers to CPO adoption in AI-driven data center networks. Ciena says the product is designed to cut power consumption by up to 70% and help hyperscalers, cloud providers, and data center operators evolve architectures for AI workloads across both scale-out networks and next-generation scale-up networks.
The company positions Vesta 200 6.4T CPX as a 200G per lane CPO optical engine intended for “leading-edge 100T and next-generation 200T” application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Ciena also says the “single-wavelength solution natively enables full fan-out AI cluster interconnect networking,” and that the engine provides the chip-edge density required for massive scale-up and scale-out networks on 200G per lane switches, XPUs, and network interface cards (NICs).
On density and mechanical integration, Ciena says it achieves “highest density pluggable CPO” via an internally developed co-optimized design combined with “2D fiber interconnect technology.” It says this enables compatibility with small co-packaged copper connectors “such as Samtec’s CPX,” supporting 200G per lane deployments in space-constrained NICs, XPU servers, and high-radix switches.
On power and signal integrity, Ciena says Vesta 200 6.4T CPX uses retimer-free linear-drive operation and supports an electrical loss budget of up to 20 dB from the host ASIC, which it says enables more flexible CPO architectures and “saving up to 70% power versus traditional, retimed options.” For reliability, Ciena says it is designed for “ultra-high availability” and cites a high-volume external light source, internally developed silicon-germanium (SiGe) drivers and transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs), temperature-stable silicon photonics Mach-Zehnder-based transmitters, and “high density standard CPX compression-free electrical connectors.”
For ecosystem and interoperability, Ciena says the product targets an open, standards-based CPO ecosystem built around a pluggable CPX electrical interconnect and an IEEE 802.3dj-compliant optical interface, with the goal of interoperability across multiple ASIC, optical, and electrical interconnect vendors. “The combination of Ciena’s Vesta 200 6.4T CPX optical engine and Samtec’s Si-Fly® HD CPX System offers AI system architects a dense interconnect solution to route 200G PAM4 data links directly from the substrate to the front panel,” said Brian Vicich, CTO at Samtec.
Source: Ciena
