Forum 2: Electrical and Optical Links Towards 400G+ Connectivity

The talk will discuss the transition to 448 Gbps electrical signaling and its impact on next-generation AI interconnect architectures. It highlights limitations in PCB loss, crosstalk, channel impairments, equalization requirements, and SNR constraints, and will review Co-Packaged Copper (CPC) and Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) architectures for reducing electrical losses and improving signal integrity. Andreas “Andy” Bechtolsheim is Chairman, Chief Development Officer and Co-Founder of Arista Networks. Previously, Andy was a Co-Founder and Chief System Architect at Sun Microsystems, responsible for next generation server, storage, and network architectures. Andy received a M.S. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976 and was a doctoral student in Computer Engineering at Stanford University from 1977 to 1982. He has been honored with a Fulbright scholarship, the Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award, the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation, the EY 2015 US Entrepreneur of the Year Award (together with Jayshree Ullal) and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.