Just going over the latest OIF webinar Co-Packaging Standardization Progress" OIF Webinar – “Co-Packaging Standardization Progress” – OIF (oiforum.com)

Standards are still up in the air but there does appear to be some consensus on form factor and power supply so far for the remote laser as presented by  Jock Bovington, Senior Hardware Engineer, Cisco. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a copy of the slide depicting the ELSFP  used to supply the switch or AI ASIC as presented by CISCO in Jock's slides but if you register for the webinar you can access the archive...probably not worth the effort.

What is interesting to me is that POET has recently sourced a CW laser that they will be utilizing for the remote laser as reported Nov 2021. Beta's expected mid 2022 for 400G (doubled for the 800G module)

External  Laser Small Form-Factor Pluggable (ELSFP) Module

• The External Laser Small Form-Factor Pluggable (ELSFP) IA is the second project initiated under the umbrella of the Co-packaged Framework Project.  The ELSFP IA will define a future proofed external laser source form factor to support co-packaged optical modules. . The form factor is a front panel pluggable module which employs a blind-mate optical connector located at the rear of the module for eye-safety considerations. The IA will define interoperability for mechanical, thermal, electrical, as well as for the optical connectors. 

http://www.gazettabyte.com/home/2021/10/31/preparing-for-a-post-pluggable-optical-module-world.html 

Jock Bovington, Senior Hardware Engineer, Cisco:

I'm going to talk today and about the ELSFP, which is the external laser, small form factor pluggable. It's a new form factor, a new pluggable that we felt it was important to the Co packaged optics architecture and is a really great place for the industry to align around a solution and reduce the total number of external laser source packaging options so that we can get some volume behind this new solution. It fills the need to pull the entire industry around, defining a common external laser pluggable rather than having the market splinter off into a large number of other external laser source packages. And again, this is in support of Co packaged optics.Uh, it will improve the system's overall faceplate density and pull everyone into a common specification so that we can have economies of scale for the connectors that are used. The ports in all of the systems and we hope that we can design it well enough today so that we can span multiple generations of system and that includes  both optical and thermal scaling. The main goal of this pluggable is to provide CW laser power to those optical engines and decrease the total thermal power density of the system that we're already putting a tremendous amount of high speed and high power consumption. ASICS and optical engines all concentrated in the center of the system. If we can pull the lasers off to the front face, we can cool down the lasers a little bit more and decrease the total thermal density so it.Is is currently realized that the larger systems like these larger switches. This solution is not exclusive to those, but it will likely need eight or maybe 16 of these in order to meet the entire requirements of the for example 51.2 T switch system.

My comment: 16 ELSFP modules at 3.2T each would be required to supply a 51.2T switch. POET’s customers need to see a roadmap that gets there to 3.2T. It is expected that POET’s high density footprint is required to make this happen. 

You could support more than one optical engine from a single  ELSFP and the probable form factor itself because  the lasers are often the least reliable component in an optical system will be hot swappable, if there's a failure of one of those lasers or a failure of the module itself and replace it very easily without bringing down the entire system. And then most importantly, eye safety and safety to the port itself is achieved through the the blind mate connector.So a critical features that that that we're targeting with this is again the the density that you can achieve is higher than if you chose a either a an additional rack mounted system for your lasers or or for example like a standard optical pluggable. 

Very important in the thought process behind the ELSFP is scaling so it can handle multiple power classes, both optical and thermal.