Ciena Unveils the Industry’s Highest-Density, Lowest-Power Pluggable Optical Engine to Meet Data Center AI Demands

• Vesta 200 6.4T CPX removes key barriers to co-packaged optics (CPO) adoption
• 200G/lane CPO ideal for leading-edge 100 and next-generation 200 Tb/s ASICs

• Single-wavelength solution natively enables full fan-out AI cluster interconnect networking

Building on its long history as the leader in high-speed connectivity – and marking the first product introduction following its acquisition of Nubis Communications – Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) is unveiling Vesta 200 6.4T CPX, the industry’s highest-density, lowest-power pluggable CPO solution.

Designed to reduce power consumption by up to 70%, the solution helps hyperscalers, cloud providers, and data center operators evolve their architectures to reliably address AI workloadsin both scale-out networks as well as next generation scale-up networks.

“We’re delivering the industry’s first truly flexible, open pluggable optical engine, removing barriers to CPO adoption and giving our customers exactly what they’ve been asking for: greater density, power efficiency, and reliability – all in an open, multi‑vendor ecosystem,” said Dino DiPerna, Senior Vice President of Global Research & Development at Ciena.

“We continue to innovate in response to evolving customer needs, allowing operators to scale AI clusters more efficiently, using less energy and space, while lowering overall infrastructure costs.”

Vesta 200 6.4T CPX provides more power-efficient optical interconnect and delivers the chip-
edge density required for massive scale-up and scale-out networks on 200G/lane switches, XPUs, and NICs.

Key features include:

• Ultra-high density: Achieves highest density pluggable CPO through Ciena’s internally developed co-optimized design, combined with unique 2D fiber interconnect technology. This enables compatibility with the smallest co-packaged copper connectors such as Samtec’s CPX and supports high-performance 200G/lane deployments in space-constrained NICs, XPU servers, and leading-edge 100T and next-generation 200T switches.

• Power reduction: Features retimer-free linear-drive operation, supporting a robust electrical loss budget of up to 20 dB from the host ASIC, enabling more flexible CPO architectures and saving up to 70% power versus traditional, retimed options.

• Superior reliability: Designed with ultra-high availability in mind, from high volume external light source to internally developed SiGe drivers and TIAs co-optimized with temperature-stable silicon photonics Mach-Zehnder–based transmitters, and high density standard CPX compression-free electrical connectors.

• New optical networking ecosystem: Provides access to an open, standards-based CPO ecosystem featuring a pluggable, CPX electrical interconnect and an IEEE802.3dj compliant optical interface enabling a flexible and diverse supply chain by promoting interoperability across multiple ASIC, optical, and electrical interconnect vendors.

Industry Comments:

• “Adoption of CPO has started. The next priority for operators is development of a competitive CPO ecosystem. Ciena’s solution offers a path for establishing such an ecosystem,” said Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of LightCounting. “An open, standards-based CPO ecosystem that creates a flexible and diverse supply chain, removing vendor lock-in and enabling interoperability across multiple ASIC, optical, and electrical interconnect vendors – is exactly what the customer would like to see.”

• “As a leading provider of network infrastructure equipment for AI networks in the world, it is critical to align with our customers’ demand for higher performance, lower power, and higher reliability,” said Michael KT Lee, Senior VP of R&D and Technology, Accton Technology. “To meet these constraints, we adopt new innovative optical technologies – whether CPO, NPO, or new pluggable form factors. We expect the use of CPO to accelerate dramatically over the next few years, and the availability of products like the Vesta 200 6.4T optical engine from Ciena will help address growing needs for next-generation scale-out and scale-up networks.”

• “The unrivaled growth in XPU scale-up networks demands low-latency, low power, high-density optical interconnects at the signal source,” said Brian Vicich, CTO at Samtec. “The combination of Ciena’s Vesta 200 6.4T CPX optical engine and Samtec’s Si-Fly® HD CPX System offers AI system architects a dense interconnect solution to route 200G PAM4 data links directly from the substrate to the front panel.”