Industry debate: OCS or not OCS?

Time: Sunday, 1 November 2026 | 1:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Location: Conference Room 205

Session Description:

As AI clusters scale to tens of thousands of accelerators, conventional electrical packet switching faces bandwidth, power, latency, and reconfiguration limits. Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) builds reconfigurable light paths with minimal O-E-O conversion, enabling software-defined topology, protocol/rate transparency, lower latency, and lower power. 

At OFC 2026, Google reported multi-generation OCS with TPU pods while NVIDIA outlined OCS possible for scale-up, scale-out, and cross-site AI fabrics. OCS target to complement (not replace), electrical cuicirt switches: it suits predictable training/elephant flows, spine reconfiguration, fault isolation, and cross-campus scheduling, while random low-latency traffic still needs packet switches. Open issues remain - SDN/control-plane integration, TCO validation, millisecond switching speed, insertion loss, and vendor interoperability. 

This forum debates when OCS is mandatory, when hybrid electrical-optical designs win, and how standards, MEMS, piezoelectric ceramic, liquid-crystal, and silicon-photonics roadmaps and operator use case studies can de-risk industrial adoption.

Keywords: OCS, MEMS, Switches, Data Center Interconnect

Organisers:

Frank Chang, Source Photonics

Hua Zhang, Luster Lighttech

Xiang Zhou, Google