OCP Global Summit (Oct 12-15) is highly anticipated this year, but I also signed up for a 2-day session (Oct 7-8) held by the Ethernet Alliance called Technology Exploration Forum (TEF) on “The AI Future: Ethernet.” Semicon West overlaps with OCP Global Summit this year sadly, so I might have to skip.
TEF 2026
TEF is two-days of panel events entirely around networking, and Ethernet is getting considerably important in the AI age. I like the idea of industry experts sitting down to talk about stuff instead of presentation talks because the unscripted nature of panels brings out a lot more insights.
Day 1 consists of the following topics, with panelists from the listed companies:
400 Gbps signaling over copper: TE Connectivity, Huawei, and Broadcom.
Optical infrastructure challenges: Commscope, Panduit, Corning.
State of multicore fiber: Panduit, Corning, Terahop, CommScope
There are also presentations from Oracle, Corning, and Meta.
Day 2 is more panel heavy than the first:
IMDD optics: Huawei, Coherent, Cisco, Ranovus
Coherent ethernet: Huawei, Cisco, Ciena, Nokia
Optical packaging: Huawei, Arista, Molex, Eliyan
Testing for AI networks: Wilder Tech, Viavi, Keysight
This event was pricey, and I wonder how much overlap there will be with OCP content. You will notice that the amount of optics content outweighs copper in the discussion topics. The future of AI networking is clearly going to light, except for some specific use cases where copper will continue to live.
OCP Global Summit
This conference is sold out, as was Hot Chips before the event. OCP has a high number of parallel events and its impossible to cover everything without an army of attendees. Look at the full schedule.
I’m going to choose two main focus areas: Networking and Power. What am I chalking out below is mostly me thinking aloud of how I’m going to approach this event. If you’re attending, hopefully this gives you a broad map of how to go about it. Usually I end up attending only 60-70% of what I plan to because I end up talking to a lot of people and also get info overloaded. I also have meetings set up with several companies too which I have to juggle (Eliyan, Credo, etc.)
Day 1 (Monday): Executive Sessions
Day 1 is entirely executive sessions from a wide variety of speakers, but the program is thankfully linear. I expect mostly high level talks, with each company trying to showcase their products. Good for high level stuff and (human) networking.
Day 2 (Tuesday): Keynotes + Sessions
Day 2 is full of keynotes before lunch, which will be another broad “sit-and-listen” session. Nothing to expect but pretty looking slides with few surprises. The afternoon session will require a balance between attending networking sessions and expo halls sessions. I’ve listed only about 5 talks max I would like to hit. I will spend rest of the time talking / walking show floor.
Networking Sessions:
Meta — Tue, October 13, 2:30pm - 2:45pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - 210AE: Operating Linear Pluggable Optics at Hyperscale: From Link Management to Production Reliability
Why: I want to understand the difficulty in deploying LPO at high speeds, and what that means for DSPs.
Expo Hall Sessions:
DELTA — Tue, October 13, 12:50pm - 1:05pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - Expo Hall Theater: Microgrids at Scale: Resilient Power Infrastructure for AI Data Centers presented by Delta Electronics
Why: How power is deployed drives how much downstream compute, networking, and storage will be needed.
Credo(?) — Tue, October 13, 3:30pm - 3:45pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - Expo Hall Theater: Going Wide: Scalable and Reliable Optical Interconnects for AI Clusters
Why: I want to see what hardware they have, and how well it works. I am also meeting with them 1:1 earlier that day.
Power Sessions (overlap, so in order of priority):
NVIDIA — Tue, October 13, 4:10pm - 4:30pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - 210CG: 800 VDC AI Factories: From Architecture Alignment to Industry Deployment
Why: Want to understand where we are in 800VDC deployments, and what the challenges are.
NVIDIA — Tue, October 13, 4:25pm - 4:40pm | SJCC - Lower Level - LL21DE: Intelligent Power Smoothing at the Vera-Rubin Rack
Why: At Hot Chips, NVIDIA claimed some TCO advantages when they could smooth out power spikes.
Day 3 (Wednesday): Mission Impossible
The AI Open DC: Power Distribution and OCP Special Focus: Photonics sessions run in parallel all day. It’s impossible to do both with one meat jacket. The only saving grace is that both sessions are the same level, so easy to keep swapping to some extent. All talks on both tracks seem interesting, and would consider this the meat and potatoes day of the conference. Too many fun ones to break down individually. For reference:
Power = Concourse Level, 210CG
Photonics = Concourse Level, 210AE
I created a filtered timetable from the OCP schedule that has only the two all-day sessions in a PDF below. You can print it out and decide how you want to interleave if you want to follow my plan.
If it isn’t enough already, and you feel like getting on the expo floor, there are a few nice options of stuff to catch:
MEGMEET — Wed, October 14, 11:20am - 11:35am | SJCC - Concourse Level - Expo Hall Theater: Engineering the Transition to 800 VDC presented by MEGMEET
Ciena — Wed, October 14, 3:20pm - 3:35pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - Expo Hall Theater: Extending Copper for Efficient Next-Generation Scale-Up Networks presented by Ciena
Samtech — Wed, October 14, 3:45pm - 4:00pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - Expo Hall Theater: A Pathway to 224/448 Gbps Copper and Optical Connectivity in AI Infrastructure
Vertiv — Wed, October 14, 4:10pm - 4:25pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - Expo Hall Theater: Future-Readiness for the 800 VDC Transition
Day 4 (Thursday): The Haunting
By Day 4, I’m usually too spent to sit through whole day sessions. I plan to haunt more talks on Concourse Level 210 like before, flitting through walls before the two halls where power and networking talks happen:
Power = Concourse Level 230A
Networking = Concourse Level 210 AE
Here is a printable filtered version. Would not recommend hitting everything though.
There are a few specifically interesting ones to me however.
NVIDIA — Thu, October 15, 1:40pm - 2:00pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - 230A: MGX Power Rack Reference Design
Why: Good to understand how the NVIDIA reference rack is built.
Texas Instruments — Thu, October 15, 2:45pm - 3:05pm | SJCC - Concourse Level - 230A: 800V Data Center DC/DC Design Considerations, Topology Comparisons, and Trade-offs
Why: TI’s talk should be pretty technical I imagine, and especially interested in what DC/DC converter options exist, and what tradeoffs exist.
There are a couple of talks worth catching on the power safety side, because safety and compliance is a layer that is not understood by most. It is critical to deploy 800VDC in datacenters.
Thu, October 15, 8:20am - 8:35am | SJCC - Concourse Level - 210CG: The New Focus on Energy Storage Systems Safety
Thu, October 15, 8:40am - 9:05am | SJCC - Concourse Level - 210CG: The Compliance Gap: ESS Safety in the Age of AI Infrastructure
The plan on the last day is to spend more time talking to people on the show floor, and also check out some exhibits in the Innovation Village for what startups are doing. There are some useful things to catch in the Expo Hall.
Sumitomo — Thu, October 15, 10:40am - 10:55am | SJCC - Concourse Level - Expo Hall Theater: Multi-Core Fiber - A solution for scale up, out, and across
Why: Want to know more about the whole multi-core fiber thing.
OmniOn — Thu, October 15, 11:40am - 11:55am | SJCC - Concourse Level - Expo Hall Theater: Driving Efficiency Through Innovation Across the Operating Range and Power Chain, Aligning Power Architecture With the Needs of AI
Why: Mention of end-to-end efficiency, and where Si, SiC, and GaN play a role.
This is already too much for a single conference, and I would be very happy if I can hit even 50% of all this content. Apologies if I miss any good content, or if your company is presenting and I didn’t add it on here. The good part is that OCP records the event, so I can always watch what I miss later on.
If you have anything else that is a must see, drop your suggestion in the comments. If you happen to see me at TEF or OCP, stop me and say hi!
Yeah there's a lot going on at OCP and I plan to attend similar sessions there.
The two things I am definitely hitting up are the OIF workshop on Tuesday afternoon and the 800V sessions all day on Wednesday for two reasons. One is that there is a real lack of standardization in the optical domain and I want to see how standardization is trending. Two, I haven't really covered 800V that much since I touched upon the power architecture at APEC back in March this year.
I'll also be taking a field trip day to Semicon West on Thursday to check out the huge expo hall. There's a test vision symposium Thursday afternoon with a really interesting session: "Townhall Debate: Testing in the Era of Convergence: Power Density, Thermal Limits, Photonics, 3D Stacks, and AI Acceleration" and a panel with NVIDIA, Advantest, Teradyne, Renesas, and AEM. Should be really good.