Microsoft × MediaTek: Successfully developed active Micro LED optical cable

MediaTek’s official Weibo reported on March 18 that a joint R&D team composed of MediaTek, Microsoft Research and other suppliers announced the successful development of a next-generation active optical cable using miniaturized Micro LED light sources.

According to reports, although current electrical copper cables have high energy efficiency, the transmission distance is usually limited to less than 2 meters; although traditional laser optical cables have longer transmission distances, they consume high power and have a failure rate up to a hundred times that of copper cables. In response to this situation, MediaTek's engineering innovation and Microsoft Research's MOSAIC technology are combined to create a new generation of active Micro LED optical cable design, which uses hundreds of parallel low-speed "wide and slow" Micro LED channels to replace the traditional "narrow and fast" laser channels, which can effectively resolve the above-mentioned trade-offs between transmission distance, energy consumption and reliability.

In addition, the joint design of active Micro LED optical cables jointly developed by Microsoft, MediaTek and others can be expanded to rates of 800 Gbps and above in standard QSFP/OSFP packages. MediaTek stated that in the future, both parties will continue to explore the feasibility of miniaturization and mass production to assist the development of future gigawatt-level AI data centers.

Micro LED AOC; Source: IT Home

Specific to product performance, the official Weibo data shows that the active Micro LED optical cable joint project has the characteristics of energy saving and consumption reduction, copper cable level reliability, longer transmission distance, higher scalability, single-chip CMOS integration, heterogeneous integration, etc., as follows:

Energy saving and consumption reduction: using direct modulation of Micro LED and eliminating complex digital signal processing, power consumption can be saved by up to 50% compared to traditional VCSEL active optical cables.

Copper cable-level reliability: The link stability is better than existing laser optical solutions and can achieve reliability comparable to that of copper cables.

Longer transmission distance: Its design achieves high-reliability transmission comparable to that of copper cables, but the transmission distance is greatly exceeded, making it suitable for large-scale cross-rack connections of AI training clusters.

Higher scalability: Higher total bandwidth can be achieved by increasing the number of optical channels in a single fiber optic cable or increasing the data rate per channel.

Single-chip CMOS integration: A single customized CMOS chip integrates all electronic functions, including SoC logic, Gear box, high-density Micro LED driver and high-sensitivity transimpedance amplifier. Key components are integrated into the same chip, which can effectively reduce the power consumption and delay burden caused by multi-chip interconnection.

Heterogeneous integration: Micro LED array and photodetector array are directly bonded on a single CMOS chip, thereby achieving extremely small pitch and ultra-high-density channel array.