The Ethernet Alliance, the global consortium dedicated to the advancement of Ethernet technologies, has announced the agenda for its upcoming, flagship Technology Exploration Forum (TEF) event.
TEF 2021: The Road Ahead (Jan. 25-29) will feature daily webinars at 1 p.m. Pacific/4 p.m. Eastern and is open to the global Ethernet community. At the center of the conversation will be the trade-offs, use cases and technology challenges surrounding selection of the next Ethernet rate.
“Clear trends toward cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, corporate mandates to work from home, as well as new workloads such as machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and streaming gaming, are combining to drive ever-increasing traffic loads - both machine to machine and to the end user,” observes Peter Jones, chair, Ethernet Alliance.
Jones continues, "The Technology Exploration Forum is an opportunity for individuals to present and share their ideas with component vendors, system vendors and end users across the broad Ethernet Alliance membership and beyond. Together, these constituencies provide a diverse set of backgrounds, ensuring lively discussion and debate for TEF 2021.”
As posited by an Ethernet Alliance statement announcing the forum:
The IEEE 802.3bs standard, completed in 2017, leveraged state-of-the-art 50 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) per lane serializer/deserializer (SerDes) technology with new eight-lane front panel pluggable modules to enable 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). With the IEEE P802.3ck development project now in mid-flight to standardize 100Gb/s per lane electrical signaling, such eight-lane module form factors could be repurposed to enable an 800GbE interface.
Although this seems a logical next step, would a factor-of-two increase to 800 GbE provide enough of a rate increase to satisfy end-user demand? Or, given that the last major speed transition was a factor of four, from 100 GbE to 400 GbE, would 1.6 Terabit Ethernet (TbE) be a more prudent next Ethernet rate? Or will the TEF discussion bring yet another perspective to be considered?
TEF 2021 will bring together key experts from both end users and manufacturers across the Ethernet technology community to discuss and debate such issues, with the goal of understanding requirements across Ethernet’s vast application horizon and building consensus.
Scheduled webinar sessions for TEF 2021 will include:
- Market Need – The Next Ethernet Rate
- New Applications Driving Higher Bandwidths
- Beyond 100G Electrical
- Technical Feasibility: Next Generation Optical Interfaces
- Test & Measurement
Learn more about registration and sponsorship opportunities for the event.