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

Speakers：

Mark Lutkowitz, fibeReality LLC, USA

Wei Chen, OneTouch, Belgium

Bo Xiong, Zhejiang University, China

Ning Deng, Great Bay University, China

Guanghui Sun, Huawei, China

Guangpeng Ma, Lumentum, USA

José Capmany, iPronics, Spain

Hua Zhang, Luster (H+S Polatis), China