In recent years, the traffic and bandwidth of the data center are growing exponentially, and the data center is also gradually transiting from 10G and 40G to 100G network, which drives the application of 100G optical modules in the data center. As a photoelectric converter, optical module is a very important part of optical fiber communication. Because optical fiber communication has the characteristics of long transmission distance, anti-interference and saving wiring space, it is widely used in data center server, switch and storage optical network.

The diversity of data center interconnection scenarios has led to the demand for different types of optical modules. Traditional data center generally uses 1G/10G low-speed optical module, while cloud data center mainly uses 40G/100G high-speed optical module. Next, ETU-LINK lists the main requirements for optical modules in several cloud data centers.

1. High speed. Due to the explosive growth of data center traffic, higher speed optical modules are needed to cope with the huge traffic transmission demand.

2. Massive demand. The number of optical modules used in data center is one order of magnitude larger than that of telecommunication.

Low power consumption. Data center switches usually have very dense ports. Low power optical modules can not only save energy consumption, but also alleviate the problem of fast heating of optical modules.

3. Small size, light weight. The high-density interface board of the switch in the data center is to improve the transmission capacity. At the same time, more ports can reduce the deployment of the switch and save the resources of the computer room. As a result, data centers need smaller optical modules to match switches with more dense interface boards.

4. Shorter iteration period. The iteration period of data center optical module is generally about 3 years, while that of telecommunication level optical module is generally 6-7 years or more.

Different data center terminal equipment, the general use of optical interconnection products are also different. Servers generally use DAC high-speed cables or AOC active optical cables, while switches generally use optical modules with patch cords.