Microsoft Research Institute and MediaTek jointly develop active MicroLED optical cable

MediaTek announced that a joint R&D team with Microsoft Research and other suppliers has successfully developed the next-generation Active Optical Cable (AOC) using miniaturized Micro LED light sources. This revolutionary ActiveMicro LEDCable design not only features copper grade high reliability, but also significantly increases transmission distance.

  MediaTek stated that nowadays data center networks often need to make trade-offs between transmission distance, power consumption, and reliability. Although copper cables are energy-efficient, their transmission distance is limited to within 2 meters. Although traditional laser optical transmission distances are relatively long, they face the problem of high energy consumption, and their failure rate can even be as high as 100 times that of copper cable transmission. The newly released active Micro LED cable design, combined with MediaTek's engineering innovation and Microsoft Research's MOSAIC technology, replaces the traditional "narrowband high-speed" laser channel architecture with hundreds of parallel operating, "broadband low-speed" Micro LED channels, effectively solving existing technical limitations and challenges.

  Vince Hu, Deputy General Manager of MediaTek, stated that this collaboration combines the technical capabilities and industry status of MediaTek and Microsoft Research, and gathers insights from both parties on data center design to successfully address key industry limitations and bottlenecks. By miniaturizing Micro LED technology and integrating it into transceivers compatible with existing data center equipment, the industry can seamlessly adopt this new technology.

  The active Micro LED fiber optic cable joint development project, jointly developed by both parties, is a fully integrated end-to-end design and has achieved multiple significant breakthroughs, including:

  Energy saving: By using directly modulated Micro LEDs and eliminating the need for complex digital signal processors (DSPs), this technology can reduce power consumption by up to 50% compared to traditional active fiber optic cables that use vertical resonant cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL).

  Reliability of Copper Cable Level: By utilizing the simple structure, high durability, and temperature insensitivity of Micro LED, this technology achieves higher reliability than current laser optical technology, and its stability is comparable to copper cable.

  Extended transmission distance: This design achieves high reliability transmission distance of copper cable level, becoming the first choice to meet the large-scale cross cabinet interconnection requirements of AI training clusters.

  Scalability: By increasing the number of optical channels within a single optical cable or improving the data transmission rate of a single channel, the bandwidth can be vertically scaled up.

  Monolithic CMOS integration: Integrating complete electronic functions including SoC logic, speed modulation mechanism (Gearbox), high-density Micro LED driver, and high-sensitivity transimpedance amplifier (TIA) using a single customized CMOS chip. By integrating the above functional modules into a single die, this design will be able to eliminate the common additional power consumption and latency caused by multi chip interconnect structures.

  Heterogeneous integration: This design directly bonds Micro LED array and photodetector (PD) array onto this single crystal CMOS chip. This advanced co packaging technology eliminates the physical limitations of traditional wire bonding and long-distance wiring, thereby achieving extremely small pixel pitch and ultra-high density channel arrays.

  Microsoft Senior Vice President and Microsoft Research Fellow Doug Burger stated that the combination of Microsoft Research's technology and the engineering capabilities of MediaTek and other partners has opened up an opportunity to significantly improve the efficiency of AI data centers. This collaboration will help us build more efficient, reliable, and cost-effective systems, while enabling more powerful AI application scenarios.

  This active Micro LED fiber optic cable joint design can increase transmission rates to 800 Gbps or even higher within standard QSFP/OSFP package sizes. Both parties will continue to explore opportunities for cooperation in miniaturization and mass production preparation, in order to jointly promote the development of future Gigawatt level large-scale AI data centers.