Cisco is taking dead aim at the hyperscale data center switch market where they have started to introduce 800G data center switches.  Cisco dominates the overall data center switch market, which reached $13.1 billion in revenue in 2021.  Switch sales to hyperscalers is expected to more than double, from $2.9 billion to $6.9 billion in 2026.

POET says that for makers of next generation network switches that require the combination of switch components and optical components in a single package, commonly referred to as “Co-Packaged Optics” (CPO), using LightBar products will reduce heat generation within the package, which is a common cause of component failure.  When used as a remote laser source, POET’s LightBar is expected to improve overall system reliability for both transceiver and CPO applications by offering the ability to replace failed laser assemblies in the field, without disturbing other components and sub-assemblies.  Laser failures have proven to be the cause of a large majority of sub-assembly failures in both optical transceivers and co-packaged optics applications.

Cisco also has two new high-density optical transceivers all capable of supporting 800G.  For makers of conventional and Silicon Photonics-based optical transceivers, the LightBar product line offers a fully aligned, tested, and multiplexed laser light source attached to an output fiber, eliminating the difficult and costly step of four laser alignments in optical transceivers.

Here are the top switch-makers:

• Juniper Networks    (Based in North America)
• HPE Aruba    (Based in North America)
• Cisco      (Based in North America)
• Arista Networks   (Based in North America)
• NETGEAR   (Based in North America)
• Extreme Networks   (Based in North America)
• NVIDIA   (Based in North America)
• D-Link    (Based in Taiwan)
• TRENDnet     (Based in North America)
  
• Huawei    (Based in China)

If you are the dominant maker of next generation switches on the planet, job one is to recognize bleeding edge, step-change technology and incorporating it. Are they?