That is a big wow. We are aware of POET's efforts to get to 3.2T such that they can meet the future standard for the 16 external laser, small form factor pluggable (ELSFP)  to supply the 51.2T Switch/AI ASIC. This is the first time that I recall seeing POET targeting a 6.4T CPO module…nice.

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.