Judy Warner (00:01.409) Hi, Matt. Thanks so much for joining us today. Always a pleasure to have you. I reached out to you today because I've been seeing and hearing a lot of buzz about optical interconnects. And I'm not really clear on where we are with the state of the industry is and also the applications that drive it. And I know that is sort of your wheelhouse right now. And especially so as you're getting ready to take Samtech to the the optical conference that's in San Francisco. So I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity. So why don't you start there and tell us a little bit about just the state of the industry as you see it. Matthew Burns (00:45.614) Sure. Happy to do so, Judy. So first of all, it's always a privilege to be here on the Ecosystem Podcast. I always love getting a chance to talk with you and talk with your audience. So appreciate the opportunity. The industry, where it's at, that's a $50,000 question, or maybe it's a $50 billion question if you're a hyperscaler. there's a lot of trends going on right now that we're just trying to stay in front of. And from a design standpoint, Judy Warner (01:05.365) Yeah. Matthew Burns (01:13.23) Maybe I can start there. Everyone's focused on channels at 224. 224 gigabits per second, PAM4. And I think we had talked about that a little bit at DesignCon. And you were at DesignCon, I wasn't able to be there, but I heard all the highlights that 224 is just a big concern. It's not going away. If anything, it's ramping up. There's a lot of thought, I guess I say, of how to implement 224. And a lot of that comes down to use case. Right? From Samtech's perspective, we still think we can, let me rephrase that, we know we can make 224 work short distances typically in the box. Right? So SciFly, you know, we showed our SciFly HD solution. It's a copper on package near chip solution that gets us from the ASIC to the front panel, gets us from the ASIC to the back plane. And that's something that we continue to see a tremendous amount of interest, not only in the Judy Warner (01:44.139) Okay. Matthew Burns (02:11.198) from our customers and but partners and integrators. So we're really excited about that solution. On the other hand, you if you have to, you start to look in data center, you start to look at the disruption of AI, copper has finite lens that can go, obviously there's AECs that you can, you know, add transceivers to, not transceivers, yeah, transceivers to clock and data recovery, re-drivers, those types of things that you can get copper cables, you know, five to seven meters. But for use cases beyond 10 meters, you have to go to the optical domain. Is that front panel to front panel? What protocol are you looking at? Is ethernet good? Is PCI Express good? Is CXL? There's a lot of challenges there. And that's kind of where the industry's at from what we see. The other thing too is that when you start to look at these use cases that AI, ML, and HPC are driving, Judy Warner (03:04.886) Mm-hmm. Matthew Burns (03:07.854) It's not necessarily just sending 224 gigabit from system to system, shelf to shelf, chassis to chassis, rack to rack. It's PCI Express, right? Do I want to send PCI Express over optics over 10 meters? Do I want to send CXL? Do I want to send an InfiniBand? And whether you're looking at GPU clustering or some of the cache coherency that CXL provides, There's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of question marks. There's a lot of work going on to answer those technical questions. Samtech finds ourselves right in the middle of it. With OFC upcoming, we have several tricks up our sleeve, I guess I'd say, Judy, that help to answer some of those questions, some of those concerns. Some of those are new, and we're excited to talk about them. Judy Warner (04:02.175) Okay, so I have a question, some questions that I hope, I think our audience might be asking in their minds too. So are most of these applications and use cases around the data center in general? And then I have some follow-on questions to that. Matthew Burns (04:07.822) Far away. Matthew Burns (04:19.682) yes and no. the reason I answer that is the big driver that's gaining all the news headlines is AI compute, AI acceleration. And when you're seeing the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being invested here in the U S around the world, the vast majority of that is AI acceleration, whether that's, and, and, and I say, acceleration generically, there's different types of AI, right? There's the. Judy Warner (04:31.574) Okay. Judy Warner (04:46.647) All right. Matthew Burns (04:47.406) There's learning, there's inference, there's training. Your generative AI has become a big push over the last six to 12 months. We're weeks out from the disruption that DeepSeq has created in terms of how to make more and more efficient models. As AI applications get larger, get faster, get more efficient, the demand for AI data center is still going to continue to grow. No one's pulling back on those investments that I'm aware of, right? And they're still getting headlines around the world. Judy Warner (05:20.747) Yeah, I think that's really, go ahead, finish your thought. Well, again, it is in the headline and it's one thing that makes me curious and thinking that our audience is curious about it, which is why I go to you because I know you're involved sort of in that whole ecosystem with chip manufacturers and all those things. And you guys have your own ecosystem about how to stand these things up. And so I'm thinking if I was an engineer today, I'd have trouble knowing what to pay attention to. Matthew Burns (05:24.002) No, no, ahead. Go ask your question. Sorry. Matthew Burns (05:37.292) Yeah. Judy Warner (05:50.199) And so what I'd be wondering is if I'm not making product that is going to end up either directly inside of a data center or adjacent to, do I care? Like, is this thing going to hit me? Because there's hundreds of billions of dollars. You know, just watch the nightly news, right? And here comes TSMC's got a factory. We've got You know, chat GPT, we've got Oracle, we've got all these things building these massive, and then Elon, you know, building Grok. And so there's all these things going on. And if I'm not designing something that goes exactly in those data centers or directly adjacent to them in my own sort of captive data center, do I care? Are there things I should be paying attention to? Matthew Burns (06:38.328) Well, that's definitely a question that, that, executive suites across the industry are battling with. there's no, there's no question that the growth in AI over the last three to five years is, is going away. I don't think that that's the only markets. I don't think that's the only thing that's driving technology. I think it's the biggest thing driving technology and I think the biggest growth opportunities, but Judy Warner (06:42.89) You Judy Warner (07:01.695) Okay. Matthew Burns (07:04.142) We still see traditional data centers, right? There's still a need for compute. There's still a need for memory. There's still a need for networking. And while AI is pushing innovation at faster and faster levels, it's faster. think you and I have talked about this innovation is happening faster than I've ever seen, Judy, in my 25 plus years in this industry. There's still opportunities for, and there's still innovation going on outside of AI. just hasn't, it hasn't got the press. Judy Warner (07:22.337) for sure. Matthew Burns (07:33.538) that AI has just because of the huge disruption that the industry's faced. And why I say that, when it comes to this copper versus optics question and use case, it's going to affect networking. It's going to affect general compute. It's going to affect where I put my memory at. Typically, you'd have maybe memory directly on your server or within your chassis. But with CXL, there's advantages in general compute to have a Judy Warner (07:36.17) Okay. Matthew Burns (08:03.406) compute chassis, completely focused on that with networked CPUs, very traditional parallel processing, very traditional serial processing, but you need access to memory pools based on the compute load. And using CXL and having a remote memory, a remote or a memory pool that's Judy Warner (08:21.365) Right. Matthew Burns (08:30.766) tens or 20 meters away, that's where Optics comes in. So I'm accessing that with CXL over Optics. I'm accessing this with PCI Express. So there's lots of use cases. the questions that you're asking and the topics that we're covering are high level. But it's not just a one size fit all. And to your point, think that's what makes it so exciting, is that if you're a technology nerd, like me, among others, and I'm sure most of the people that listen in, Judy Warner (08:48.278) Okay. Matthew Burns (08:59.318) are interested with where things are going. know, Sam tech is obviously I'm getting along with it. I want to try to be answer the question quickly. Sam tech continues to invest for AI because that's where the market's going. But we also continue to invest in our R and D copper versus copper versus optics for data center, general compute AI HPC, right? Just because AI is taken off like, like crazy. HPC is still a market that's growing unto itself. So, you know, it's, it's not just one thing. Judy Warner (09:24.447) Right, okay. Matthew Burns (09:27.628) You know, AI is definitely the antipong gorilla, but all these other adjacencies are still there. Plus, and this is maybe just a slight adjacent and I'll wrap up. Look at the investment that's going on in mill arrow because of the security concerns globally, right? Europe's ramping up, Asia's ramping up, know, US and its allies are ramping up. so there's, there's a lot of growth opportunities besides just, AI. Judy Warner (09:32.257) Okay. Judy Warner (09:42.293) Yeah. Matthew Burns (09:53.176) But anyway, that's not why we're here. We want to talk about optics and property. Yeah. Judy Warner (09:54.263) Okay, no, well, I, but it helps. It's kind of like laying out the map and saying you are here and I want to do that for our audience because it's easy to just go, that optical, that's just for those. It's easy to put that in the box and say that won't touch me. Yeah, yeah. And you remember when we thought RF wouldn't touch anybody, right? And so I think Matthew Burns (10:18.19) Yeah, you're right. Judy Warner (10:21.067) we're in some version of that or heading there. Like you don't think I'm trying to stay ahead of the curve and give our audience some insights like here it comes. So they know what to look for. Right. And so that was my, helped me sort of. So thank you for taking the time to unpack that. And I think those adjacencies is where people in our audience are going to end up. Whether they, yes, whether they know it or not now, I think it's coming. Matthew Burns (10:39.817) Happy to. Matthew Burns (10:45.708) without question. Judy Warner (10:50.805) So, you know, obviously you're on the front lines dealing with your customers, your partners and all of that, and you are getting ready to go to OFC. So why do you choose that show? And then what are some things you've developed either with your customers and partners that you're showing there? So if we have people, audiences that are going there, they know what to look for. Matthew Burns (11:15.17) Yeah. The reason that Samtech goes to OFC is that that's one of the largest optical networking trade shows on the planet. And for North America, it's by far the largest. We've been attending, I've been at Samtech for going on 10 years, Judy, and the 10 years I've been here, with the exception of the pandemic, we've been at the event every time it's held. It's a meeting point for data center folks. It's a meeting place for Judy Warner (11:37.334) Okay. Matthew Burns (11:43.79) compute, it's a meeting place for interconnect like Samtech, test and measurement, RF. It's one of several trade shows throughout the years that are catering to this ecosystem. And that's why we continue to go. One of the different years with Samtech though is that most people, at least most people I talk to, when they think of optics in the data center, optics in AI, they tend to think of optics on the front panel. Judy Warner (11:58.944) Okay. Matthew Burns (12:11.534) So you route your data from your ASIC through your PCB to the front panel. There's typically some sort of MSA cage, know, QSFP, QSFP, PDD, OSFP, OSFP, PXT. That's where the industry is going right now. And then the E2O or an O2E conversions on an optical cable that plugs into those cages. Economies of scale, multi-source agreements, providers from around the planet. It's a great model that continues to work for data center. Samtech looks at it from a different perspective because while those solutions make sense, we find having midboard optics provides flexibility, better SI performance because you can put the optical transceiver right next to the ASIC within the system. You can scale it, you get better system density, et cetera, et cetera. Now granted, we're not necessarily on the bleeding edge of performance, but the fact that we can support PCI-5. Judy Warner (13:03.371) Okay. Matthew Burns (13:10.542) over optics, the fact that we can support 56 gigabit, 112 gigabit. And these are some of the technologies that we're going to be demonstrating at OFC. Excuse me. Too many trade shows in my mind. Yeah, we're talking about OFC here coming up April 1st through 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. These are solutions that we're going after. the reason that we focus on... Judy Warner (13:23.275) I see. What show are we at? Yeah, I know. Matthew Burns (13:36.3) I kind of see a bifurcation in terms of the opportunities that we see when it comes to optics. Going back to AI, because AI system market, everyone thinks Nvidia is the only, let me rephrase that. I want to make sure I say this correctly. Nvidia is the antirpong gorilla in the AI industry right now because their GPUs have been great at scaling to meet the size of the LLM modules and will continue to be an influence within the industry. However, as AI gets more application specific and the foundation models are changing, there's different AI acceleration platforms coming out. Tesla has Dojo, Microsoft has Maya, Google has their TPUs. System architectures are gonna change to adapt to the AI acceleration platform that makes the most sense for the end market. So that's changing AI system architectures. PCI Express is being used in new ways besides talking to a CPU to an I.O. Right? And then you add PCIe and CXL over optics, again, going from a GPU or a CPU to your memory outside the system, different system architectures. Those... Judy Warner (14:40.151) Hmm. Matthew Burns (15:00.782) equipment providers and solution and those integrators like card based solutions. PCI Express, ChemAIC cards have been around forever and they will continue to be around forever. OCP, NIC 3.0, EDSFF, M.2. The fact that Samtech can put optical transceivers on those cards and enable systems to talk to each other host endpoint or host to host multiplexed is a value add that we can bring. So our Firefly products, our next generation halo optical transceivers, we're putting on these card solutions to address these disruptive system architectures that need to be developed because of the diversity of AI acceleration platforms that are coming down the pike. So you're... Judy Warner (15:29.962) Okay. Judy Warner (15:49.045) And are those sort of modular things you can swap out with these cards? There's been some talk about that. Okay. No, I keep hearing about the problem, like we can't replace these massive data centers and put a whole new system in there. So how do we do this with modular systems? Matthew Burns (15:54.766) That's exactly, no, go ahead. Sorry. Matthew Burns (16:06.508) That's the modularity of a form factor like a Kemi IC card allows you to do just that. So, you know, I designed in PCI five, I need to get to PCI six, swap the cards out, drop them back in, there you go. And same thing with OCP, same thing with M.2, et cetera, et cetera. So the fact that we're getting into that market is... Judy Warner (16:17.397) All right. Good. Okay. Judy Warner (16:26.497) Okay. Matthew Burns (16:32.744) the market's taking us. Another form factor, OCP, Open Compute Project, they have their OAI form factor specifically for AI applications. There's an entire ecosystem there. So we've demonstrated OAI EXP modules using our optical transceivers, plug in the back of that chassis, and all of sudden you can link dozens if not hundreds of these chassis using Samtech midboard optical transceivers. Judy Warner (16:34.347) All right. Judy Warner (17:01.985) Good. Okay. This is why I call you Matt, because I know you have all these answers. Matthew Burns (17:03.096) Yeah. Well, there are some of the answers. I wish them take out answers to every technical problem that the industry faces, but that's just not quite reality. That's why the ecosystem is so large. Judy Warner (17:16.273) I know, but really it helps. Like I said, I want to let our community know like you are here. Here's what's coming. You know, here's the challenges. Here's what's going on with the ecosystem. And, you know, I just appreciate your partnership with Samtech because you keep us abreast of all, all of that and, and what the implications are, right? Going to be for engineers and it's moving so fast. You know, what I'm trying to do is just... Matthew Burns (17:40.749) It is. Judy Warner (17:42.391) Remap, reorient it. Okay, here you are now on the map. And so people can track the technologies and kind of know what's coming down the pipeline. Okay, so back to OCP. what are the kinds of, you've talked about some of the mid board solutions and all of that. So I'm sure, you know, every time companies like Samtex come to a new show, they bring a whole host of new demos and toys and yours are always really fun to see. with your flyover cables and know, sci-fi and they're all super fun to watch. So what do you have on deck to show in your booth? Matthew Burns (18:21.486) So, you know, again, the thing that's funny to me about OFC is it's an optical networking trade show, but there's still a tremendous amount of interest in copper. So we're going to we'll be featuring Sci-Fi HD again. We had a really positive experience talking about our integrated solution. We can mention the fact that we're working with Broadcom because that was that was the first time we had launched that or demonstrated that that joint project showing our solution next to their Tuner G transceivers. We're going to have a very similar demo set up at Judy Warner (18:33.236) Okay. Matthew Burns (18:51.898) OFC because of the amount of interest that we've seen in it. Broadcom is a great partner. We look forward to working with them on that. SciFly again, SciFly HD is just taking the market by storm in terms of co-packaged copper or near chip interconnectivity for 224 next to the ASIC. So that's going to be a big push for us. On the optic side, we're going to be demonstrating for the first time 112 gigabit per second performance. Judy Warner (19:02.86) yay. Matthew Burns (19:18.926) with our halo platform. We've demonstrated 56 in the past. We're close to productizing it. 56 is our next performance node that we're, excuse me, 112 is our next performance node that we're looking at. We've been talking about PCI 5 over optics for a while. We're going to have our first PCI 5 over optics product demonstration or proof of concept at OFC. We've never done that before, so we're real excited about it. Customers have been asking us for that solution for a while. So we're happy to meet the needs of that, at least first time prototype at OFC. continue, a lot of tests and we're continuing to expand our RF test capabilities with our bullseye platform out to 90 gigahertz. We've got some really good results. It'll be showing actually beyond 90 gigahertz. You and I are talking, we've been talking about the implementation of 224, which is going to be a big theme for 25. But the market never rests. When you start to look at the standards bodies, OIF, IEEE, they're starting to look at 448 gigabit per second data rates per lane, right? It's nuts. Mind blown, right? There's a lot of discussion going on in terms of what's going to be the encoding scheme for 448. It's going to be PAM4, PAM6, PAM8. Judy Warner (20:14.422) Okay. Judy Warner (20:33.406) Nuts. Matthew Burns (20:43.512) don't really know yet that'll call the industry will call us around something eventually. But we have some preliminary platforms that we have that show testing out to beyond a hundred gigahertz or bullseye ISI platforms. So we'll be demonstrating that in further detail at at OFC here in a couple of weeks. So it's really a combination of high speed, co-packaged copper, high speed midboard optics and high frequency Judy Warner (20:47.766) You're right. Matthew Burns (21:13.358) test platforms out beyond 100 gigahertz that we'll be featuring at OSC. Coming up April 1st through 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Judy. Judy Warner (21:24.599) Okay, so for the majority of people that are listening to this math that cannot or will not be attending OFC, where can they go get more information? Do you have online demos or papers or tutorials, like anything where they could dig in to all these things you mentioned so they can just learn more? Matthew Burns (21:44.236) Yeah, of course. So Samtech website is the best resource for all of our latest solutions. You can check out samtech.com slash optics for optical solutions. You can check out samtech.com slash bullseye for our bullseye test platforms that we mentioned. And you can also check out our blog, blog.samtech.com for all the latest news. And honestly, you know, each time we do a new demo, we put a video up on our blog. Judy Warner (21:53.419) Okay. Matthew Burns (22:11.118) So if anyone wants to see the demonstration we've had at DesignCon or some of the things that we'll have at OFC, just check out the blog post. Yep. Judy Warner (22:12.404) Okay. Judy Warner (22:16.087) Okay, I didn't know that. That's good to know. I've never actually asked you that before. So I'll definitely get those links put into the show notes for our audience and that'll be a great place to go geek out. So, because a lot of people won't be able to go to that show. So, okay. Well, thanks for this at least, you know, 30,000 foot view of Matthew Burns (22:27.555) Awesome. Judy Warner (22:43.243) you know, the state of where we are with copper and optics and where it fits and where we're going and sort of, you know, what you're seeing from the front lines of people, companies that are innovating in this space and customers. So thanks again. It's always a pleasure to have you and have a little geek fest with you. Matthew Burns (23:01.708) Happy to be here, Judy, thanks for the opportunity. I really appreciate the time talking with you and your audience. Judy Warner (23:06.475) Thank you for our audience. Thanks for joining us today. As I mentioned, I'll put all the links that Matt mentioned in the show notes below. If you do happen to be going to OFC, you can go see those things live. Matt will be on site if you need to talk to him or his AEs and that'll be a fun little thing to look into and see operating if you have the chance. So thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. Until then, remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem.