Mosaic: Breaking the Optics versus Copper Trade-off with a Wide-and-Slow Architecture and MicroLEDs
Kaoutar Benyahya, Ariel Gómez, Junyi Liu, Vassily Lyutsarev, Marianna Pantouvaki, Kai Shi, Shawn Yohanes Siew, Hitesh Ballani, Thomas Burridge, Daniel Cletheroe, Thomas Karagiannis, Brian Robertson, Antony I.T. Rowstron, Mengyang Yang, Paolo Costa · 2025
Link technologies in today's data center networks impose a fundamental trade-off between reach, power, and reliability. Copper links are power-efficient and reliable but have very limited reach (< 2 m). Optical links offer longer reach but at the expense of high power consumption and lower reliability. As network speeds increase, this trade-off becomes more pronounced, constraining future scalability.