Back to the Future with 10Mb/s Single Pair Ethernet - Peter Jones, Ethernet Alliance AND Cisco
It’s hard to believe but 10Mb/s Ethernet is becoming a very hot topic in the industry again. I get asked “Why are we going back to the 1980s?” There is a simple answer, and to those of us in the industry at that time, it’s very familiar. In that era before Ethernet became ubiquitous, networking truly was the wild west. Everyone had their own protocols, physical layers, connectors etc. However, since then IT has converged a core set of technologies, with Ethernet leading the way, that provides seamless connectivity to billions of people.
Peter Jones,
Distinguished
Engineer, Cisco
If I look at the ceiling in my office, I can see the wireless access points (AP) that connect to Ethernet. I can also see lights, temperature sensors, HVAC devices, exit lighting and many other types of devices that don’t. The “Operational Technology” (OT) world looks like IT in the 90s, with such a wide range of physical layers and protocols that you would think everyone had invented their own (see link) .
10Mb/s Single Pair Ethernet (10SPE) was approved by IEEE in November 2019 adding two new physical layer specifications to support data and power over 1000m of single twisted pair copper cable, as well as multidrop with 8 nodes on 25m of cable. These attributes make it uniquely suited to enable Ethernet at the edge of building and Industrial automation networks. The Advanced Physical Layer (APL link) project builds on 10SPE to address operation in hazardous locations.
10SPE has been developed to meet the needs of Building and Industrial Automation users and make the transition to Ethernet simpler and faster. This makes the adoption of current networking protocols and services a tractable problem, enabling the OT world to access the benefits of 30 years of innovation in the IT space. The industry now has the opportunity to build a single shared network infrastructure for a facility.
In the year Ethernet turns 40, I’m excited about a speed from its first days.
Ethernet: The Global Connectivity Technology - Nathan Tracy, Ethernet Alliance AND TE Connectivity
2020 will bring yet another evolutionary step in the growth and dominance of Ethernet as the global connectivity technology. The same base technology that enabled cost effective LAN communications within the office building 40 years ago continues to find adoption in new markets as everyone wants to benefit from the cost, performance and flexibility that Ethernet offers.
Nathan Tracy,
Manager,
Industry Standards, TE
Connectivity
New applications that will be developing Ethernet solutions in 2020 include wired Ethernet networks in automobiles and commercial vehicles at rates greater than 10Gbps, as well as development of optical Ethernet networks for vehicles as well. Most are aware of the auto industry’s development of autonomous vehicles and its requirements. However, the sensors, cameras and control systems that will enable such an engineering marvel will also require a high performance Ethernet network to protect the occupants while they also enjoy all the networked benefits of individual climate control and individual audio and video entertainment. At the same time, the network must provide the prioritization of traffic related to safety above the traffic related to comfort and entertainment.
For industrial, business, vehicle and home applications we will see expansion of the Power over Ethernet (PoE) specified performance as new variants of PoE are documented and brought to market to power a broad range of new applications and systems ranging from smart buildings, to home appliances and Internet of Things sensors and controls. To ensure that PoE products marketed as compliant to these performance levels have been validated by certified third party laboratories the Ethernet Alliance will roll out of its next phase of the PoE certification program. Another area of rapid adoption of new Ethernet technology is for applications enabling the connectivity of our homes and businesses to the core network via the development of next generation Passive Optical Network (PON) technology that will enable aggregated network rates of 50Gbps over network reaches of at least 50km.
New, faster Ethernet data rates will also be coming to market to address the demands of new video intensive applications accessed via “cloud” networks. To address data rates such as 100Gbps, 200Gbps and 400Gbps, technologists are developing new materials and new architectures that will allow these rates to defy what has been impossible in the past. Using powerful simulation tools and building on past experience but with new materials, we will see Ethernet equipment, optical modules, connectors and cables that enable the hyperscale or “cloud” data center operators to continue to scale to new levels of performance and provide new services.
Indeed, 2020 will not only be the year that IEEE 802.3 turns 40 years old, but it will also be a year of continuing expansion and growth of Ethernet applications, performance and next generation data rates.
Ethernet’s expansion into new markets continues - Jim Theodoras, Ethernet Alliance AND HG Genuine USA
Jim Theodoras,
VP, R&D,
HG Genuine
USA
2020 will see Ethernet continue its expansion into new markets and applications. Ethernet has been gradually displacing many alternative specialized protocols due to its many benefits and economies of scale. And as bandwidth requirements continue to grow exponentially, Ethernet has had to not only get faster, but also move to more complex modulation formats and greater parallelism. Instead of bits per second, we now talk of baud rates; and serial channels are now “N by” serial channels with embedded frame markers to allow realignment. If we step back and look at the big picture, Ethernet has grown from being a point-to-point communication channel to the underlying foundation of distributed compute fabrics everywhere.
Digging deeper, 2020 will see yet another milestone for Ethernet with the arrival of 112Gbit/s per lane based products. While 100 Gigabit Ethernet is not new, achieving this speed in serial lanes not only enables a third generation of cost optimized 100 Gigabit Ethernet products, but also enables a second generation of 400 Gigabit Ethernet and the first 800 Gigabit per second products. Everything in the Ethernet ecosystem has had to make a leap forward to run faster, wider, and at a more complex modulation format. First generation 400 Gigabit Ethernet client side optical transceivers based on 8x28Gbaud PAM4 will start shipping. Meanwhile, the first 800 Gigabit/s clients will be demonstrated in 8 x 100 Gigabit Ethernet and 2 x 400 Gigabit Ethernet breakout form. The promise of lower cost coherent communication links in the form of 400G-ZR should finally be realized.
As a greater proportion of optical transceivers and active-optical-cables are consumed in local compute fabrics, it only makes sense to minimize overhead and directly attach optics to silicon ICs within these fabrics. Co-packaged optics are far from production ready, but 2020 will see very important work being performed behind the scenes, as the Ethernet industry shifts its engineering might as well as development dollars towards integrating optical communications directly onto silicon die.
The Ethernet Ecosystem and The Machine Learning Cloud - Rob Stone, Ethernet Alliance AND Broadcom
Global networking bandwidth growth across all sectors is traditionally driven by two main factors; adding users, and from adding new applications. Although user growth continues to climb, it is dwarfed by the bandwidth requirements driven by new applications which ultimately mandate employment of new networking technologies to keep up with demand. One such application class which is driving exponential growth over recent years is artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) and in particular convolutional deep neural networks.
Rob Stone,
Distingushed
Engineer,
Broadcom
Deployment of an ML system involves two phases. Firstly the neural network models need to be trained by the use of training datasets. Once the trained models are judged sufficiently accurate, they are passed to inference engines, where end applications can use the trained model to predict (or "infer") results subject to classification of external data or queries.
To speed up the ML training process, parallelization is used, with multiple individual training nodes involved. This results in an enormous demand on the network to distribute training data between nodes and also during the subsequent training process as parameters are exchanged between nodes to improve the model accuracy. During inference, the end application emphasizes rapid return of a result, to minimize lag visible to the end user, and so low latency is critical. For these reasons, all major hyperscale operators have now deployed custom ML hardware, and several offer cloud based ML as a service for end user applications. Competition between different ML cloud services forces operators to continue to invest in network infrastructure upgrades to stay competitive, which in turn drives the Ethernet community to respond with technologies to support the increased bandwidth requirements, with the challenges of remaining in an acceptable power and cost profile.
However, these back-end ML systems are not useful unless the input data can be collected and sent to the inference engines for predictions to be made. Devices such as autonomous vehicles, industrial IoT and smart homes, offices and cities employ a diverse set of connectivity technologies, wireless (personal area networks, as well as local area networks or WiFi), wired, including leverage of Power over Ethernet technologies, and cellular (LTE and 5G). All of these technologies heavily leverage the Ethernet ecosystem for cost effective broad based interoperable solutions.
Nathan Tracy currently serves on the Ethernet Alliance board of directors, and has been an active contributor to the organization over the past several years. He is a technologist on the system architecture team and manager of industry standards for the Data and Devices business unit at TE Connectivity, responsible for driving standards activities and working with key customers to enable new system architectures. Nathan is also an active member in several industry associations, currently serving as President and board member of the OIF, and is a regular attendee and contributor to IEEE 802.3™ and COBO.
Jim Theodoras is on the Ethernet Board of Directors and VP of R&D at HG Genuine USA. He is an experienced optical communication professional with a proven history of creating new revenue streams through a combination of creativity, market analysis, customer interaction, cross-functional teamwork, and follow-through. He has over 30 years of industry experience in electronics and optics, spanning a wide range of diverse topics. Jim is a past President of the Ethernet Alliance and past optical liaison editor for IEEE Communications Magazine. He holds 20 patents in the field of telecommunications, and is a frequent contributor to industry publications.
Rob Stone, Ethernet Alliance Board of Directors, is a Distinguished Engineer within Broadcom’s Switch Architecture Team, with a focus on datacenter interconnects, protocol and port design. His is an active participant in a number of industry organizations, including IEEE 802.3, COBO and other module MSAs and chaired the RCx MSA, and the 25G Ethernet technical working group. Rob has over 18 years of industry experience bringing communications technologies to market. He has held both technical and managerial positions at Intel, Infinera, Emcore, Skorpios and Bandwidth 9.
