These insatiable demands for more bandwidth are resulting in higher speed and higher density optics and ASICs. The aggregate throughput of switch and optics devices is doubling every two to three years, which ultimately results in doubling the speed and increases in power of the host to pluggable optics electrical interface. Unfortunately, while Moore's Law continues to allow us to scale our chips and equipment (despite non-trivial technical challenges), its corollary, Dennard Scaling, has been dead for a while. This means the power required for the new generation of switch and optics semiconductors is higher than the previous one.

Read More ...