India, March 16 -- Over the past decade, switch bandwidth has scaled alongside hyperscale cloud and distributed workloads, with AI now dramatically accelerating this trend. This growth has been enabled by high-speed pluggable optical transceivers. However, scaling within existing QSFP and OSFP form factors is becoming increasingly difficult, as connector density, front-panel bandwidth, and especially power consumption are emerging as major constraints.

Looking ahead to 1.6T optics and beyond, switch I/O must move from 112G-class to 224G-class electrical SerDes. At these data rates, the electrical channel across the package, PCB traces, and connectors becomes extremely lossy and difficult to equalise, causing a sharp rise in SerDes power....