Credo announced the availability of the Dove850, designed to enable cheaper and lower-power 800G optical modules. It uses a retimer in the receive direction, and only the transmit path includes a DSP for signal retiming and equalization. This approach reduces the power of optics without some of the challenges in pure LPO solutions.
Over the last year, LPO has been a popular topic as the industry looks for ways to reduce power consumption in datacenters. However, customer enthusiasm has been curbed because of technical limitations such as interoperability, link accountability, and the ability to troubleshoot, which drove our forecast for LPO to less than 10% of the 800GbE market. Credo’s Dove 850 is a half-retimed solution that addresses these limitations, consumes less power than conventional optics, and provides a clear path to 224G for 1.6 Tb/s operation. This solution should significantly expand the market for low power 800GbE solutions well beyond that of LPO.
Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst Optical Components at Cignal AI