Co-Packaged Optical Transceivers for HPC, Data Centre and AI Applications

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AI workloads are breaking the interconnect. As models scale, the bottleneck moves off the chip and onto the wire — and co-packaged optics is the industry's answer. Daniel M. Kuchta, Principal Hardware System Architect at NVIDIA and an IEEE Fellow, gives the guest lecture in the CONNECT Visiting Lecturer Series at Trinity College Dublin. He covers the state of co-packaged optical transceiver technology across both VCSEL and silicon-photonics approaches, how they fit the evolving Ethernet switch and computer I/O landscape, and what large-scale AI is doing to the performance, scalability and energy-efficiency requirements of modern data centres. Kuchta spent three decades at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center on optical interconnect, holds 40+ patents and 145+ publications, and chaired OFC. An hour with someone genuinely at the frontier of how AI infrastructure actually gets built — rare in Dublin, and free.