Author: Mr. Lin Weizhi, Executive Vice President, Ji-Pu Industrial Trend Research Institute

At the OFC (Optical Fiber Communications Conference) held in San Diego last month, it was rare that three differently positioned MSAs (Multi-Source Agreement) were simultaneously announced in the same exhibition period, XPO, OCI, and Open CPX. I think the significance of MSA is much more than a technical specification document, but an industry signal that when a hyperscaler is ready to purchase a certain technology on a large scale, there will be a business incentive for many vendors to sit down and work together to formulate a standard, so that the buyer can freely choose among multiple vendors without being bound by a single vendor. Therefore, the birth of MSA means that "something is really going to be purchased in large quantities". Therefore, a list of the three MSA agreements is as follows

• OCI (Optical Compute Interconnect) -A client-driven revolution in underlying protocols:Initiated by AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, VIDIA, and OpenAI, the OCI-defined Scale-Up scenario is expected to have a hierarchical structure in terms of light source technology: VCSELs or MicroLEDs will lead the way in short-range racks (<50m), replacing copper cables with very low pJ/bit efficiency; and silicon photonics with CW external lasers will take over for the longer cross-rack segments. The longer distance cross-rack segment will be undertaken by silicon photonics with CW external laser solution. These two technology directions represent the specific paths of the "copper to light" inflection point in the Scale-Up scenario - VCSELs are already in mass production in Broadcom NPOs (~1 pJ/bit), and MicroLEDs are being promoted by Avicena (<1 pJ/bit), with lower but still evaluating kit stage power consumption. MicroLEDs are being pushed by Avicena (<1 pJ/bit) with even lower power consumption but are still in the evaluation kit stage. However, the exit of copper will not be a one-size-fits-all event, as NVIDIA itself is a founding member of OCI and the largest beneficiary of the NVLink copper ecosystem, and in this capacity, NVIDIA is the largest beneficiary of the NVLink copper ecosystem.
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