Credo unveils ZeroFlap optical transceivers – Reliability revolution for optics in AI networks

Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd (Credo), an innovator in providing secure, high-speed connectivity solutions that deliver improved reliability and energy efficiency, has announced its ZeroFlap (ZF) optical transceiver product line supporting 400G, 800G, and 1.6T network speeds.

The ZF optical transceiver product portfolio is designed to enable better management and mitigation of optical link flaps — an issue whereby a link will repeatedly connect and disconnect in quick succession — providing a new level of network stability and productivity to AI backend networks.

 The new ZF optical transceivers utilize Credo’s PILOT1 platform to address optical transceiver reliability in AI networks through system hardening, advanced telemetry, and remote management. As AI cluster sizes scale beyond 1GW, transceiver reliability has proven to be a limiting factor in cluster stability and uptime. Furthermore, customer demand for bare-metal GPU instances limits the operators’ ability to manage GPU facing optics.

Credo’s ZF optical transceivers solve these issues through:

• Mission mode optical link quality monitoring, including Bit Error Rates (BER), Forward Error Correction (FEC) histograms and multipath interference (MPI) indicating contamination in optical connections.
• Transparent, in-band messaging enables comprehensive optical link management from either endpoint, supporting bare-metal deployments, and heterogeneous operating system environments.
• On transceiver, non-volatile, event logging for debug and auditing purposes.
• PILOT platform extensions, residing on network switches, for optics telemetry extraction and streaming to monitoring agents, initially supporting SONiC and other switch operating systems.
• Enhanced component hardening and proactive self-diagnostics to detect impending failures such as laser degradation or electrostatic discharge related damage.

ZeroFlap optics and Open Compute Project
As part of our commitment to standardization, Credo will contribute the ZF optical specification to a new Optics Reliability Workstream that Credo and Oracle will chair inside the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation.

“Moving our ZeroFlap commitment beyond AECs to optics requires a system approach to collecting, processing and actioning telemetry before it leads to a link flap,” said Chris Collins, AVP for optical products at Credo. “Credo is committed to the ZeroFlap revolution and is excited to work with the OCP community to standardize this important effort.”