RF Over Plastic Is a Third Option Between Copper and Optics: Point2's Sean Park

0:00Sean Park: All right. Hey, Vik. Today's conversation is super interesting. It's scale-up interconnects, but it's not copper. It's not optics. It's radio frequency over a plastic waveguide. This is fascinating. So it's your conversation with Sean Park, CEO of Point2. How did you come across Sean and why did you want to have him on Semidote? The discussion is always between copper and optics, but so much of the conversation around this has never centered around the third option. So I first came across 0.2 technologies in my sub stack where I've written about them in quite some depth. And then I ran into Sean at OCP APAC and I stopped by that booth.

0:43Sean Park: And so we're like, okay, let's get into this and talk on the podcast. It's so much more fun when we can delve into all the details. So let's listen to the podcast in the interview with Sean. And then I want to jump on with you afterward and discuss maybe if this can actually ship and if there's any sort of practical realities to deploying this. So without any further ado, let's get into the conversation.

1:12Sean Park: Welcome to the Semi-Dope podcast where we have conversations with the best minds in the semiconductor industry. I'm Vic Shaker and I've worked in the semiconductor industry for about 20 years, mostly on the engineering side. I am the founder of SemiExponent, where I do independent semiconductor research, focused mainly on AI and hardware infrastructure. And I also write Vic's newsletter on Substack, where I explain how technology works and why it matters for the industry. With me is Sean Park, who's the president and CEO of Point2 Technology. He's a seasoned executive with decades of experience in semiconductors, wireless and networking.

1:47Sean Park: Throughout his career, he has held leadership positions in many companies you'll recognize immediately, including IDT, which later became Renaissance, TerraSquare, Marvel Semiconductor as well. As a CEO and CTO and a founder at TerraSquare, Sean was responsible for leading the company's strategic direction and overseeing its day-to-day operations. He was also a director at Marvel, where he provided invaluable guidance and expertise to help the company achieve its goals. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Washington and also attended Seoul National University. Welcome, Sean.

2:22Sean Park: Welcome to Semidoped.

2:23Vik Sekar: Thank you, Vik. Great introduction.

2:25Sean Park: I'm glad you liked it. I'm glad you liked it. Yeah, we've spoken to, you know, in the past at OCP, APAC, where like I stopped by your demo and we like played around with all the tech you had there. And it's exciting to have you on the podcast so we can like discuss all the cool stuff we talked about. for the general audience, because not everybody can be at OCP APAC. So that's why we have you here.

2:53Vik Sekar: Thank you. Thank you so much.

2:55Sean Park: Yeah, so Sean, so basically point two has this very unique idea. And I like it because my own background is RF, actually. And so I kind of relate to it closely. Everybody is always trying to connect data centers together with either copper or optics. It's always like team red versus team green, or there's always like two sides fighting a battle. But you have this third approach. And you were like, let's send RF over a plastic cable. Tell us, basically, how did you come across this idea and decided you want to go down this path of everything else?

3:31Vik Sekar: Yeah, so I have been involved in this data center market for the last 20 years. And previous that 20 years ago, I also worked on the wireless systems, wireless chips. And in fact, the wireless signals we call radio frequency signal. And that is really good for wireless system, like a signal over air and then connect to different or many different systems all together. And what if we use that RF signal over some sort of wireline communication? And then we can, in fact, we can extend the reach of cables in terms of distance. And also we can make a very simple, simple silicon solution. And distance will be longer and power will be much more efficient than existing optical system.

4:28Vik Sekar: So that's the kind of concept that we started.

4:31Sean Park: That's nice. So very nice points you hit on here. One of them is, I think, when you say radio frequency, everybody imagines it's some kind of a wireless link. So I think one thing we want to clarify up front is, this is not a wireless link between two connections in a data center or anything. So this is actually a wired connection, except that the wire itself is a plastic tube or a plastic cable. And we'll get into why that is important and what the benefits are. And we also get into the points that you mentioned about how it saves energy in the data center and why that's really important. That's a very good problem that you have in a different approach.

5:10Sean Park: So it's really nice to see innovation in different aspects. But this isn't a problem you've been working on last year or two years, right? You've worked on this problem for a long time.

5:21Vik Sekar: Point two has been around for a while now.

5:25Sean Park: So tell us about that journey.

5:27Vik Sekar: So we spent many years researching on the waveguide concept. And like I mentioned, RF over plastic concept is something that we really created first time, I believe. And then it's not really easy because the, I mean, wireless signal, RF signal, is travel along some sort of plastic waveguide. I mean, in fact, you will see some dispersion and also some distortion while it travels through the cable. So that's kind of fundamental problem we need to solve first. So we spent many years how we can make the cable wave at itself is linear medium so that we can transmit data over plastic. But when we received it, it still maintained the same shape, same quality of the signal at the receiver part.

6:28Sean Park: Yeah, so it's not as easy as people imagined. You can just like send radio frequency over a plastic waveguide. We call it like a cable, but it's actually what it is, is a waveguide. And waveguides have been around since like World War II. And they have been typically the guiding systems of radio communications for a very long time.

6:48Vik Sekar: Exactly, like the radar system. Radar system, they put the waveguide pipe on the dish, and then they transmit very high power through the dish and they put in the air so that they can detect some object in the air. So that is the first concept of waveguide, is metal pipe delivering high power while it's signaling to the dish. and then we use the same concept, but it's flexible cable and it's not really metal pipe. So metal pipe is kind of defined boundary condition material. And instead the cable itself is very dynamic. It's move around, it can be banded. So it's not easy to put some signal in the flexible dynamic cable and then receive that on the other side.

7:43We still have very clean signal.

7:46Vik Sekar: at the end.

7:48Sean Park: Yeah, so one of the benefits of the typical waveguiding structures where RF flows through is that it's actually surrounded by metal on all sides. This cable, and you have a sample which we will see later, is definitely not having any of this like metal over all sides kind of thing. Anyway, it's a different structure and engineering RF to flow over this was the big challenge to get it to work, right? That's right. Right now, you're still a private company, but recently I was looking at all your financing and all that. It seems like there's a lot of interest. Do you want to fill us in on who your investors are?

8:24Sean Park: Who's really excited about your technology at the moment?

8:27Vik Sekar: So anyone who see the problem in scale-up network interconnect, they like our solution. The reason is that our solution is silicon plus simple connector and copper like a waveguide cable. It's very simple, cost-effective, low power, and easy build. Complexity is a lot less than optics. So they like our solution. So for example, like a GPU company is NVIDIA, ARM, they invest in our company. And also a foundry company in Taiwan, UMC, they invest in our company. And cable companies like a Molex, they also invest in our company. So that kind of proves that our solution is very attractive in this market and in our ecosystem partners.

9:16Sean Park: That's exciting. So like scale up, the moment you say scale up, like I'm sure like half the listeners are going to prick up their ears here because it's actually kind of a problem in our current data center world. And I can imagine that this really, this problem has emerged into like your universe in the last couple of years because our GPUs are exploding in the data center and we need to hook up all these GPUs in a rack. Now, clearly when you mentioned scale up, I noted that you don't mention scale up, scale across. So by saying scale up, immediately you're like, okay, we have a limited reach in which we want this technology to work, right?

9:56Sean Park: So let's set that expectation clear up front. What is the kind of reach you're going for with this technology? And then we'll go into really how this thing works because we always cover the physics behind technologies here. But what's the reach?

10:08Vik Sekar: So our first generation e-tube will target 5 to 10 meters. That is a good distance for scale-up network. So within the rack, connect many GPUs together and rack-to-rack applications.

10:23Sean Park: Okay, so that's perfect. So because even when you say rack-to-rack, it's not really scale-out still. Nowadays, because the scale-up itself has so many GPUs, you can't fit them in a rack. You have to put them in multiple racks. And now you have to connect them up as if they were one rack for which you need cables. And so five to 10 meters covers even multiple rack scenario, right?

10:45Vik Sekar: That's right. Yeah, five meters, we can connect four and 10 meters, we can connect eight racks. So that is good distance. So copper cannot reach.

10:55Sean Park: Yes, copper cannot reach this distance. And that's why we need something else. This episode of Semi-Doped is presented by Crusoe. They build the power, the data centers, and the cloud behind AI. Did you know Crusoe can help you tune an open source model on your own data for just a few bucks? Frontier models are very good, but they don't know your company's terminology, your part numbers, or how you like your reports formatted. So you keep stuffing instructions and context into the prompt of an expensive frontier model to get the job done. But for simple repeatable work like reports, an open source model trained on your data can actually match a much bigger model.

11:34Sean Park: Think of a new grad with three months of on-the-job training. You don't always need the PhD. And the open model is cheaper and faster to run. Fine-tuning used to mean renting GPUs, working on orchestration and Kubernetes, writing training code, and babysitting the entire setup process. But Crusoe's serverless fine-tuning removes all of that. Upload your datasets, pick an open model like GLM, LAMA, or DeepSeek, and they handle the training. You pay per million token used, not per GPU hour. And on the smaller models like QN3 8B,$2 can take you a long way with millions of training tokens available.

12:13Sean Park: Once the training is done, you can then deploy them on Crusoe Cloud in just one click or download the weights and run them anywhere. Your data only fine-tunes your model. And it doesn't have to be work data either. You can try it on how you write emails. Pick a task, compare the tuned model to your current prompt, and see how it does. Crusoe's giving all new accounts$5 in credit to get started today. That's enough to start tinkering with fine-tuning right now. Links in the description. All right, awesome. Now we have to go through really understanding how this works. So guide us through the whole process of the technology and how it works.

12:51Sean Park: Don't worry about the detail. We'll get into as much of it as we can. It's very exciting under the hood. So basically, we have a simple problem. We have electrical signal at one GPU and another electrical signal that has to be received by the GPU eight racks away, let's say, 10 meters. eight racks away. Now, what is the process of signal conversion between the electrical here to the electrical signal eight racks away? What happens here?

13:22Vik Sekar: So, we have four different technologies inside our e-tube platform. So, first, we need RF transmitter. For example, on one side of the rack, let's say we have an RF transmitter, and that converts the baseband electrical signal into RF domain signal, for example, like 100 gigahertz, 200 gigahertz of range of RF signals. And then since we're using RF signal, we need to launch into cable. And for that part, we need antenna and we need RF connector, two couple antenna and the cable. And then once it transmits through the cable part, that is waveguide, and the other side is exactly same component, connector, antenna, but it is receiver.

14:13Vik Sekar: So all those components, especially for silicon part, is a fully integrated silicon with antenna inside the package. And connector is simple waveguide RF connector. And cable is similar to copper. It looks like copper, but inside we don't have a copper core. So that's the main difference. And that's why we we can still manufacture that cable using existing copper equipment. Awesome.

14:41Sean Park: Can you show us the cable now? If you're watching on YouTube, you're going to benefit because Sean's going to show us the cable.

14:47Vik Sekar: So I'm going to show you first plastic core. That is a pure plastic material, very flexible. This is polyethylene. And then since we are going to bundle several cores of this into one cable bundle. So we need to shield it. So we cover this white dielectric waveguide core and then we put metal outside. This is for shielding per force. So this cable looks exactly the same as copper cable. But since we're using Wiley's signal and RF signal, we don't have a differential pair. We only have a single core. And then we also put multi-channel inside this cable core, so we can reduce the number of cables compared to copper.

15:45Sean Park: Okay, so when you say that you will have a differential pair, do you mean you will have two of these cables, these blue cables you showed us for every connection?

15:58Vik Sekar: Oh, no. What I said is that we don't need differential pair. Copper, they needed twin X differential pair, but we don't. So effectively, we can reduce the number of cables by 4X compared to copper because we put two channels into one cable core and then we don't have differential pair. So roughly it's 4X better in terms of cable density.

16:24Sean Park: Okay, that's very interesting. So when you say two channels, what exactly is that? Are there different frequencies that go inside?

16:31Vik Sekar: Exactly. I mean, if you think about like FM radio or AM radio, you can use many different channels to deliver some data over the air. So we use the same concept. We use the two channels, different frequency band, and then we can put two data rates into one cable core.

16:56Sean Park: Okay, so does that double the data rate across a single cable because of that? That's right.

17:02Vik Sekar: So for example, this is 1.60 cable. 1.60, the IEEE standard is 200 gigabit per second per channel. But in our cable, we are putting 400 gigabit per second per cable core.

17:18Sean Park: Okay, so that cable already has two times 200. Okay, so each frequency that's within the cable, let's say 100 gigahertz, like you mentioned, is 100 gigahertz carrying 200 gigabit? per second, the 200 gigahertz is carrying 200 gigabit per second. So totally you have 400 gig.

17:38Vik Sekar: That's right. I mean, in terms of data, this data rate is 400 gigabit per second. But in terms of frequency band, we are using 90 gigahertz to 225 gigahertz. So it's less than, of course, it's less than 4 gigahertz bandwidth because we are using PAN4 and then we are using upconversion in RF domain. So in terms of bandwidth, requirement is a lot less than the data rate that you talk about.

18:07Sean Park: Okay, so this is very interesting. Now, clearly there is some part of the circuit, some transmitter, receiver, transceiver circuit that is converting electrical signals into these 90 and 225 gigahertz signals. Do you have a sample of that and can you walk us through what that looks like and what it does?

18:28Vik Sekar: Yeah. So I already showed the cable parts. So this is our 1.6 T OSAP module sample. So if I open up the shell.

18:39Sean Park: Oh, look at that. Yeah.

18:43Vik Sekar: Then I'm showing you two pieces. One is silicone. Okay. And the other one is a connector on top of that silicone. So I will open up this connector, and then you will see transmitter one side. The other side, you will see receiver.

18:59Sean Park: Okay. In the middle is the antenna. Middle is the antenna. Okay, I'm going to describe what I'm looking at. So if people are listening to this, they'll know what I am seeing. So basically, this is like an OSFP connector that is kind of a standard form factor that goes into data centers. And inside it is like a PCB, and there are two chips inside. and one is a transmitter chip and one is a receiver chip and on top of one of them was like a connector that Sean just removed to show us and on either side is actually an antenna that is actually integrated into the silicon so that it can launch RF signals from the silicon into the plastic cable.

19:42Sean Park: Is that right? Exactly, exactly. Okay, amazing. That looks really nice. So that's the nice thing about this is that and I'm looking at this OSFP connector. I'm like, wait, there is no laser inside. There's nothing like that's fancy. Oh, that's the connector. Okay.

19:59Vik Sekar: That's the connector.

20:00Sean Park: Ah-ha-ha, okay.

20:01Vik Sekar: It's a very simple connector. So bottom side goes on top of the chip and antenna. And the other side, we have four slots. Yeah. And then we can slot in this plastic cable like this. Okay. Very simple coupling. Okay.

20:25Sean Park: Okay. I see. So what happens is that the underside of that connector sits on top of the chip where there's an antenna. So it will just couple all the signals from the IC into the connector. But the connector has a cable coming in from the side. So eventually the RF signal will get coupled into the cable. And that's how you get, you know, the signals converted from the electrical domain to the RF domain and sent over 90 and 225 gigahertz on this cable.

20:56Vik Sekar: That's right. Exactly.

20:59Sean Park: What is fancy about, I was mentioning this just now, this is very simple inside. Like if you see the OSFP modules of an optical module, for example, you'll see so many things inside it. You will see a laser, you'll see a driver, you'll see wire bonds, you'll see this, you'll see that. This looks very simple in comparison. Right.

21:18Vik Sekar: Very simple and fully integrated, like I said, is a fully integrated silicon solution.

21:24Sean Park: Okay. Silicon. Silicon is good. I think the industry likes silicon for one reason. It's well proven. It's tested. It's probably the most tested and most used material on planet Earth. And, you know, it is not sensitive to a lot of temperature issues like laser materials are. And so that's a big concern in data centers, right? Right.

21:49Vik Sekar: So no laser, more reliable. Silicon, like I said, is proven. And also another good thing about Silicon is that this is very scalable in terms of volume. So we are using 12-inch wafer. I mean, demand in this type of interconnect is huge. Market is really, really big, and then it'll go even bigger. And the scalability in terms of production and volume is very critical. Our supply chain is based on fully integrated silicon, 12-inch, plus the existing cable manufacturing equipments, like copper equipments, and very simple connector. So in terms of supply chain, it's a lot simpler than any existing interconnect solutions.

22:35Sean Park: Also, this is not like a 3-nanometer technology, which is like everybody is competing for capacity, right? Like this, what is the, can you say the technology node used here?

22:46Vik Sekar: So this is 55 nanometer.

22:48Sean Park: Okay, okay. So this is very different from all the high competition, you know, CPU, GPU based, you know, that you can't get allocation for. You can get allocation for 55 nanometer, no problem.

23:00Vik Sekar: No problem. And the TPAP cost is, I don't know, I can say that, but it's 50 times less than any other GPU TPAP cost.

23:10Sean Park: Yeah, the tape out costs are so much lesser that you can easily reduce the cost of the connector itself. So you don't have to deal with leading at silicon capacity, getting all that packaging and none of that complexity is here. Right. And do you have any, you said you use PAM4 already, but is there any kind of DSP anywhere in this system? Or is it like a non-DSP system completely?

23:42Vik Sekar: Oh, this is a non-DSP system. So we only need a RF transceiver. And then RF transceiver, we have also baseband circuitries that handles the interface between, for example, switch AZ or GPU to our chipset and module. So we have sort of an equalizer inside.

24:03Sean Park: Okay, so you do some analog equalization and it's not like full digital retiming or anything.

24:10Vik Sekar: No, it's not.

24:11Sean Park: Okay, so it's just some light amount of analog equalization to recover the signal. And I bet that helps increase the bit error rate as you go to these higher speeds. That's right. That's very nice, actually. So the other thing I was thinking about is when I'm looking at that module, you said the supply chain is really not an issue on the silicon side. I completely agree. The rest of it in the OSFP, just like PCB-based connectors, it's like all this is fine. What about the cable itself? Is that difficult to get or is that widely available?

24:49Vik Sekar: So cable itself, I mean, if you think about existing copper cable, so if you peel off layer by layer, so starting from the middle, it has a copper core surrounded by insulator. And then our very outer layer is another copper or aluminum shield or ground layer. So that structure is very similar to our structure. The only difference is in the middle, we don't have copper core. And the insulator that's been used for copper cable, in fact, that is dielectric. So we are using exactly the same material that has been used for copper cable. So extrusion of those dielectric insulator and plastic, the process is very similar to the existing copper cable manufacturing.

25:47Sean Park: okay so in the scale up domain this is going to be a lot of cable requirement here so like clearly we need to have enough of these plastic cables to be able to make it to work right that's right that's right and one other thing i noticed when i actually held the cable that you showed us on the podcast here when i was in person is like it's really light yeah that is really light and And you couple that with the information you gave us earlier that, you know, this cable does the job of actually four copper cables in a sense. What immediately came to my mind is how much space and weight this cable will save in a scale-up domain, right?

26:32Sean Park: Can you explain in a sense why the weight and the density benefits matter for a plastic cable as compared to copper?

26:42Vik Sekar: So density is very critical in Scala. For example, Envilink 72. Envilink 72, within the rack, they have 72 GPUs. And then in order to connect 72 GPUs all together, they need an interconnect, 72 times 72 interconnects. That is 5 ,184 interconnects. So that is the number of couple cables in MVLink 72 system. So a lot of cables and the weight really matters and also density matters because too many cables, too heavy, very difficult to handle, very difficult to assemble. And then the airflow is important for cooling, but too many cables, of course, block the airflow. And in our case, our first generation e-tube solution, we can reduce the volume of the cable by 4x, and then weight will be six times less than the copper interconnects.

27:44Vik Sekar: So that really matters.

27:47Sean Park: Yeah, I was trying to also calculate what you were saying. 72 times 72 is 5184 GPUs, but that's only for NVLink 72. Like if we go to NVLink 144, you doubled it. So which means the number of cable requirements is going to go four times.

28:06Vik Sekar: Exactly, four times. That is more than 20 ,000 cables. It's not really sustainable using existing copper interconnects.

28:14Sean Park: Right, right. So that's why I think people were like, okay, like I can't put any more copper in the racks. So let's go to multiple racks. So what you're saying is like, if we can put 144 cables in a single rack and we can connect them all with plastic e-tube cable, it's a good solution because for one, you can actually connect them all up if you have the cable density to be much lighter and more dense than what a copper interconnect offers in the same space. You don't have to go to multiple racks if you can avoid it, which is the best solution.

28:48Vik Sekar: yeah if it works then of course it's the best solution we'll scale like a silicon

28:54Sean Park: yeah yeah exactly how does this what so since it's completely shielded i'm guessing that just like copper there's no crosstalk issues when you put all these cables in a in a rack right like

29:06Vik Sekar: they're all shielded anyway right i mean in our case we really care about the shielding because we need to minimize the crosstalk and interferes outside from inside, inside to outside. So we use the same concept as copper. So outer layer is a copper shield. And then that kind of prevents the old interference. And then we measured the performance is better than 50 dBc. It's a really, really good number.

29:37Sean Park: Nice, nice. Yeah, this is nice because not only do you have something that is lighter than copper, but you have something that is probably more flexible than an optical cable. Is that true? Do you think the bend radius is nice on this thing, plastic cable?

29:51Vik Sekar: Yeah, let me show you. So we can, I mean, of course, mechanically we can bend any shape, but in terms of electrical performance, our bending radius is 4.7 millimeters. So 4.7 millimeters is I can still like around it across my finger, that is roughly five millimeters. So this is really good bending radius.

30:20Sean Park: So you just wrap it around your little finger, right? And you're like, okay, that's about five millimeters.

30:25Vik Sekar: My little finger is still bigger. So I think I need to use a smaller finger, but that's the smallest I have.

30:32Sean Park: Yeah, yeah. No, that's good. Like I think bend radius is important too, because you've got to be able to route these cables in the rack. and you can keep them all straight all the time. So that's also a consideration.

30:44Vik Sekar: Exactly.

30:46Sean Park: Yeah. So this cable industry is now splitting into active electrical cable. Then on the other side, you have active optical cable. In the optical cable, nowadays, everybody's talking about Vixels or micro-LED. So what is your version of the cable called?

31:05Vik Sekar: We call it active RF cable. In short, it is ARC or ARC.

31:12Sean Park: ARC, ARC, okay. The ARC cables then will go in the scale-up domain, which is very important because I don't think anybody should compare this technology to scale-out. This is not a replacement for scale-out optics. 50-meter reach, 100-meter reach, that's something you cannot compete with. Optics does a great job in that.

31:33Vik Sekar: Right. I mean, optics, for scale-out, it was always optics. I mean, in the past, it was optics. And in the future, it will be optics. That's for sure. So that market is growing. That is good market. But that's optical solution market. Not for us. I mean, we specifically, intentionally target scale up. It's very high volume, very important to market.

31:59Sean Park: Yeah, that's good. So that's very clear to distinguish because many people, I feel like, they confuse technologies. and there is always a right technology for the application. You have to find, you have to match it to the right technology because it's not always about reach. It's about cost. It is about scalability. It's about how many errors you can correct for or use. It's about temperature stability, reliability. There are so many variables that matter. That's right.

32:32Vik Sekar: That's right. So reliability is really important for scale-up, especially for ULINK and VLINK type of interconnect. So they try to put the interconnect inside a box, inside the system box, and then they want to put the interconnect right next to their XPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. And if they put interconnect solution, active interconnect solution inside a box, reliability really, really matters. If something happens, you need to replace it. But optics, I mean, sorry to compare always with optics, but optics is relatively non-reliable solution compared to silicon. So it's kind of dangerous for them to use optical solution inside their system.

33:23Sean Park: Yeah, in the optics domain as well, today you see a lot of talk about putting optics closer to the GPU and XPU.

33:35Vik Sekar: Right.

33:35Sean Park: And you have solutions like CPO that comes up. And it's always a question of reliability there because, like you say, when you have interconnects that go right up to the GPU inside the rack case, it's not like on the external to the rack. It's inside. That's right. It's very difficult to change anything if something goes wrong. Think about it. Like each rack has 5 ,000 cables. Like how do you know what went wrong? Like, how do you know what to change? Now, multiply that by, you know, all the racks in a data center. It's a massive problem, right? But I suppose since you only have a silicon chip there as a transceiver that converts electrical to RF signals, you could very well use the co-packaged approach with RF as well, right?

34:20Vik Sekar: Exactly. So that was what I was trying to say. I mean, so our first application will be pluggable use case, like ARC, active RF cable. And the second use case is inside the system, inside the box. So that is like a backplane solution to connect many GPS all together, scale up. And those cases, basically, we only need silicon a lot more reliable than any other optical solutions. So we plan to do that. We call it near-packaged E-tube or co-packaged E-tube.

35:00Sean Park: So that's NPE or CPE, if you want to...

35:04Vik Sekar: That's right, NPE and CPE, exactly.

35:06Sean Park: Right. And one other nice thing maybe I should ask you to explain about, at least what I think is nice, is the fact that, do you need any kind of gearboxing chip? And for those listening, if you don't know what a gearboxing chip is, you know, a lot of the interconnect solutions today have a wide but slow approach, which means that you have to convert a 200 gig lane into, you know, four 50 gig lanes or, you know, 40, five gig lanes. right so you have to make that conversion because you can't launch into an interconnect that only runs either at 50 gig per second when your incoming signal is 200 gig per second so there's a chip that sits in the middle called a gearboxing chip that converts 200 gigs to maybe 50 gigs like but for your case the nice thing that you have in the scale up domain that things like micro vixels don't have and micro LEDs don't have is that you don't need a gearboxing chip.

36:09Sean Park: Is that right?

36:10Vik Sekar: We don't need a gearbox chip at all. So our electrical interface is 100 % compatible to existing or future IEEE data rate. So we take a 200G data rate as it is, and we just convert that to RF domain, and we deliver that signal over plastic cable.

36:30Sean Park: Okay, that's very helpful. So because these gearbox chips are actually usually leading at silicon chips, they are not 55 nanometer chips, right?

36:39Vik Sekar: It's very expensive and very power hungry.

36:44Sean Park: Okay, perfect. Power. Let's talk about power. It's a very important question, especially in the world of data centers and scale-up. because the one thing that has stopped optics to become prominent in the scale-up domain, and NVIDIA has said this at many events that even I have been to, they're like, no, it's too expensive, energy expensive. It's not about cost. They're like, it sucks too much power. I cannot spend per rack anywhere between 20 and 40 kilowatts, okay, just for networking. To put this in context, in the cloud era of data centers, The entire rack with all the compute and everything in it used to only be 15 or 20 kilowatts a rack.

37:28Sean Park: Now our data center racks have become like 200 kilowatts. And now we are talking about spending what used to be a whole rack worth of compute only for networking. And NVIDIA has always said like, no, we will stay with copper as long as we can because we can't spend this much energy on just networking. Yeah, that's right. What is the point? What does the e-tube offer in that aspect?

37:54Vik Sekar: So our power efficiency is a lot better than optics. I mean, if you think about why optics consume a lot of power, because they need electrical optical conversion. And for that purpose, they need laser, photo detector, they need some interface, silicon like a TIA and driver, and sometimes they need DSP. In our case, we only need fully integrated silicon chips. So power efficiency is a lot better than optics. So we always claim that it's 3x better. And for example, this 1.60 first generation, we only consume 10 watts, less than 10 watts per module. So that is in terms of efficiency is like 5 picotipers per bit.

38:43Vik Sekar: And for NPE and CPE use case, our power consumption will be less than 2 pcs per bit.

38:54Sean Park: That's comparable to the CPO co-packaged optics level of promised energy efficiency per bit, right? That's the same range.

39:04Vik Sekar: Same range, but I think our solution in terms of power consumption, it will scale as the silicon scales.

39:13Sean Park: Which means you can go to a smaller node and you can save the transceiver power?

39:18Vik Sekar: Exactly. I mean, that's kind of fundamental benefit of all the silicon technology we had, right? So in the past, for example, I have been working on the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, those kind of wireless chip design. And every year, and Mabel, every year we reduce the power consumption by 30-40%. by migrating from one process node to the other process node. I mean, it will definitely happen to us as well. So tomorrow, we'll hit two pikachu per bit. And the day after tomorrow, we'll hit one pikachu per bit.

40:00Sean Park: Yeah, so you'll go to maybe a 22 nanometer or something. And then... Yeah, that's right. Because it's still not a leading edge technology. At 22 nanometers, you're not even in the FinFET era of technology. You're still in planar MOSFETs.

40:14Vik Sekar: Yeah, not at all. I mean, we are making use of the wireless domain silicon technology. We don't really need fast digital circuitries at all. So that's kind of another benefit of our process.

40:28Sean Park: The fact that you don't need digital circuitry or DSP or a forward error correction, things like that, to happen at that module level, it might still happen on the host level. But it won't happen on the module because you don't have a DSP there. Straight away, one advantage that comes by just pure analog equalization is that you have better latency. That's right.

40:53Vik Sekar: In terms of latency, DSP versus our solution, the difference is 1 ,000 times. So our latency is like a picosecond, nanosecond, I mean, below nanosecond range. Okay.

41:08Sean Park: Yeah, that's very important because scale-up, in the scale-up domain, especially during training runs when you have these all-reduced operations, the training run becomes as slow as the slowest link in the network. So you need all of them to have the lowest latency possible. And DSP usually doesn't allow this because to do the DSP, you need all the bits to arrive. And once the bits arrive, you do some error calculation and recovery and all of that stuff. All of that takes too long and too much power. DSP suck power. That's right.

41:41Vik Sekar: Exactly.

41:42Sean Park: You avoid all of that.

41:44Vik Sekar: We don't have that. We don't have that. And then license is a lot better. And then, yeah.

41:51Sean Park: So within the pluggable module itself that you showed us today, what is your biggest challenge within that module? Clearly some part of it has to be the hardest for you. What do you think is your biggest challenge within it?

42:03Vik Sekar: So in fact, we have spent many years on e-tube technology. I mean, nothing was really easy. First, think about the frequency range that we are using. We are using like 100 gigahertz, 200 gigahertz of range of signals, right? So nobody has done 200G circuit design before. So that was the first challenge that we faced before, but not anymore because we already have silicon. And on top of that, we still need to build kind of our own ecosystem. I mean, relatively easier because we can still make use of existing copper manufacturing equipment and then ecosystem. But still, we need to convince cable manufacturers and we need to convince other ecosystem partners so that they can move on.

42:58Vik Sekar: So that was kind of a difficult part in the past. Hmm.

43:02Sean Park: That's also because you have this near packaged and co-packaged D-tube ideas. Would you consider also being part of like the OpenCPX MSA? So this is like a consortium. This is a consortium of companies who are coming up with a solution to put, it's an open ecosystem of providers for those listening, so that multiple people can supply the equivalent of co-packaged whatever, co-packaged copper, co-packaged e-tube, co-packaged optics. So you fit into that ecosystem, right?

43:37Vik Sekar: In fact, we are part of the consortium.

43:40Sean Park: Okay, that's great. Yeah, that's good because now we have so many different competing solutions in the co-packaged space that I think yours would be another one of them that is interesting and provides more options to people looking to do scale up.

43:55Vik Sekar: Exactly. We will give freedom for system engineers to decide.

44:01Sean Park: Yeah, yeah. Choose the best. So that's, I want to also cover in general. I think we've covered like seriously, like I think I like this technology in a sense that it's different. And I always like the third option that we like, okay, like why do we always have to stick to technology? Somebody's doing something totally different. I totally, totally love that. So in terms of actually getting this stuff into the hands of a customer, let's say a hyperscaler or somebody building, what would they need to happen to this technology so that it is currently now going to be used in data centers? What do they want from you?

44:38Vik Sekar: So, I mean, we have spent many years to convince our partners and also our customers, including hyperscalers, GP companies, including NVIDIA. And right now, we are at the point to deliver our product in their hands so that they can test in their labs, their environment, and they really need to use in their system. So that's the next step. After that, we, of course, we need to go through the qualification process. That will take many months.

45:13Sean Park: And in the qualification process itself, do they have to do reliability testing? And what are the steps in the qualification that usually are required for interconnects and scale up like this?

45:24Vik Sekar: Right. I mean, all those qualification process is very similar for e-tube and also similar to copper and also the optics. But usually they call it gorilla test. So they'll kind of plug in and plug out and twist, and then they will run script to all different use cases for each equipment. So, I mean, it's not an easy process, but no matter what, we need to go through it.

45:54Sean Park: Yeah, they'll put your ETU cable to the test, right? Like they'll put it in temperature, they will give it mechanical abuse.

46:01Vik Sekar: Temperature cycle, exactly, mechanical abuse, and then some scripts to kind of try to find out the breakpoints. So, yeah.

46:11Sean Park: Yeah, that's interesting. So this is what it takes to get, you know, this is useful because I think many other startups will also look at this and go like, okay, like getting this actually into the hands of a hyperscaler is a lot more harder than just inventing the technology and showing that it works in the lab. I think that is the key takeaway that, you know, your experience already shows.

46:33Vik Sekar: exactly yeah

46:34Sean Park: so what do you in the broader scheme of things like I want to step back a bit we are in the era I think where we really don't have one solution fits all in the scale up domain I think we are at a very exciting time in history in data centers and interconnect technology because all these years copper has been the way and everybody's like yeah just use copper is a spine and you know in the future they're like okay let's put a pcb or something and hook it up but it's all copper however you want to do it we have come to a point where by the end of the decade we will definitely not have copper working in the scale-up domain and this is this is a first in a sense so i want to get your thoughts on what you think what kind of solutions you think will emerge?

47:30Sean Park: And if you think there would be one solution that fits everything, like this technology wins it all? Or you think that there will be like separations of people trying various technologies, some hyperscalers adopting solution A, solution B? How do you think of that as a competitor in the space?

47:50Vik Sekar: I believe three technologies, our solution, optics and copper, I think they will coexist for long period of times. Because copper is still useful for very short distance. I mean, some people, they want to use copper, so they will design their system to accommodate the short distance of copper. And that way, they can keep using copper. And some people, they already heavily invested in the optical solution, and they must use it. So they will use it. And some people who has kind of more sophisticated idea, I mean, they will think of our solution as more reliable, cost-effective, and less power solution.

48:40Vik Sekar: So they will use it. So I think for a long period of time, they will use three of the solution all together in different places.

48:47Sean Park: Amazing. And do you see RF e-tube technology also scaling to faster lane rates as we go ahead? In the future?

48:55Vik Sekar: Yeah, so we're already working on the next generation. So per cable core, it'll be close to one therapy per second data rate. So we're already working on it. So that'll be our next generation tips and eTube solution.

49:09Sean Park: Fantastic. Like, yeah, that's always the question to ask because at some point we'll be like, oh, no, if eTube runs out of like steam, just as in copper, then what do we do? We have to then resort to optics. But the nice thing about waveguides, and this is more of like an electromagnetics thing, is that there is no real physical upper limit to frequency in a waveguiding system.

49:36Vik Sekar: Exactly, exactly. I mean, if you think about copper, why copper has limited bandwidth? Simply because copper has too many electrons. And those electrons, when it flows, it creates a skin effect. And because of a skin effect, bandwidth is limited. And so what I'm saying is that the bandwidth limitation simply comes from the existence of electrons. And this plastic, it doesn't have electron. So in terms of bandwidth, it is unlimited. Bandwidth is unlimited. So once our silicon works, we don't have to really change this cable at all. Just scale this silicon, then it will be used for higher data rate.

50:29Sean Park: That's fantastic. Okay. I think your coverage of this topic has been very exciting. But just before the show, I wanted to hit one more thing. Just before the show, we were talking about some things like how we got into this technology and all that. And you mentioned that in spite of all your technological advancement on this interconnect technology using RF, your first customer was not related to RF at all. Can you tell us that story? Oh, yeah.

51:01Vik Sekar: So I have been thinking about data center. That's why I started this company using e-tube technology. But our first customer, they were display companies. I mean, not just one. So for example, they wanted to have a very thin wallpaper type of display. And in order to make a thickness, it's very thin, three millimeter. And they cannot put like a silicone in the panel. It's an OLED panel. and then they cannot put decoder, encoder inside the panel at all. So they put every TV function outside of the panel, they put that in the setup box. So between setup box and the panel, they need high-speed interconnect because they cannot decompress and they cannot decode in the panel at all.

52:03Vik Sekar: So they need to transmit raw video data, uncompressed video data to the panel. So data rate suddenly becomes 100 gigahertz per second, 400 gigahertz per second, a very high data rate for consumer electronics applications. So they look for some other interconnect other than copper. Copper is too thick. They cannot really fit in. And they look for optics. But optics is too expensive for consumer electronics. And also it's power hungry. and in terms of thermal, it's too much thermal dissipation. So they don't want to use optics. So they look at our solution and they thought, oh, this is the one, very thin, low power, longer distance.

52:51Vik Sekar: So they put some money for us to develop the TV application, consumer application, e-tube solution. So that was our first customer.

53:02Sean Park: That's amazing. Is that actually adopted? Or did they find another solution out of it?

53:08Vik Sekar: Unfortunately, they kind of delay that project and they stay with the kind of copper solution.

53:18Sean Park: Yeah, yeah. No, that's a fantastic thing. It gave rise to a technology that now has potential uses in something much, much larger than set-top boxes and TVs. The data center interconnect is a far bigger opportunity than any of that stuff. So it's good in a way. It's okay if they didn't adopt it. At the end of the day, you have a far larger opportunity because of that one problem you tried to solve in a different area.

53:47Vik Sekar: Yeah, exactly. But I think eventually, our generation, I mean, people will use more data in the future. Not just data center. I mean, for example, one of our investors at Bosch, Bosch is the number one automotive kind of component company. And I think they invest in our company because we have a very cool, long distance and low power interconnect solution. They are thinking of using our e-tube solution in their automotive network. That's interesting. I mean, in the near future, I'm pretty sure we'll be in the automotive market as well. Of course, we need to spend a lot more cycles and spend time with our customers in data center first.

54:36Sean Park: Yeah, that's a good reach application, right? Like a car cannot be 10 meters long. It's a little bit much. So the reach is limited in a vehicle, and that's what makes this a good solution. Right. So our cable is lighter and the distance is longer.

54:53Vik Sekar: And self-driving car, it requires many sensors and very high resolution camera. And then they need to connect all those sensors all together to their ECU. So data is getting higher and then they are looking for lighter because lighter cable means a lot for automotive because it will increase the efficiency of automotive.

55:17Sean Park: Yeah, so there's applications far beyond data centers as well. Like we started with obviously set up boxes, but now it could be automotive or anywhere you need like a high-speed interconnect using relatively simple materials and technologies and whose reach is within the 5 to 10 meter range. It fits, this solution fits all of those applications.

55:39Vik Sekar: Exactly.

55:40Sean Park: Awesome. Thank you so much, Sean. This was very interesting. Thank you for teaching us all of the school technologies you're working on. Definitely check out Point2 Technologies. Your website has all this information that people can go check out. And you're often at conferences. So if any of the people listening here, they should stop by and check out your demos like I did at OCP APAC in Taiwan. It's really fun to see this stuff in action. All right, Vic, that was a fascinating conversation. Now, what I'm super interested in is your perspective on will this actually replace something in scale up some technology like passive cables or AECs or potentially rack to rack optics?

56:22Sean Park: And also, what do you think on the practical timeline of a new technology for scaling up like this actually getting deployed in volume? let's start with the second one first because in terms of timeline this technology is relatively new it's it's old but new you know it's been around for a long time but it's not been in deployment right and now you are seeing a lot more alternative technologies coming up so we would put it at least you know a few years away like i'm not exactly sure how to pinpoint it because it depends on how much they can scale to volume and things like that. But it's definitely not something that you will see mass production in hyperscalers or big data centers today, right?

57:09Sean Park: But that being said, today, most of the scale-up in a rack happens with copper. And it's okay at 200 gigs per lane. You can even run bidirectional, which means you can run transmit and receive on the same copper cable. It all fits within a single rack, no problem. We are now going from single rack scale up domains to multi rack scale up domains. Now distances are increasing. And now when you put racks next to each other, now you need to hook them up. You need much more reach than copper can even provide. And now the question is, what are you going to do? So are you going to use optics? Maybe, but it's very power expensive if you're going to use pluggable transceivers.

57:49Sean Park: So the option is, okay, let's go to co-packaged optics or near packaged optics. Yes, but that's an entirely new ecosystem that nobody's ever done before. So it's like a big step up from what we know how to do. All right, so you've got the copper doesn't work, optics works, but it's overkill perhaps. And so what are you left with? You're left with alternative technologies like micro LEDs or micro Vixels. Okay, now the problem with these technologies is that they don't run at the speed of copper, which means to say 200 gigs per lane runs within a single rack today, even bidirectionally. These technologies don't do that.

58:25Sean Park: So micro Vixels could probably run at 50 gig and micro LEDs run at maybe 3 gig. So they are much slower. So what you have to do is you have to convert the 200 gigs per lane that's coming out of the XPU or the switch. You need to convert that into something much, much slower. And that is done with something called a gearbox chip. the gearbox converts as fast but narrow to slow but wide and that has its penalty because this chip needs its own energy to make this conversion it's another point of failure potentially and i'm not sure if it adds latency but i guess the complexity is that it's just higher now right so the beauty of RF over plastic waveguide is that it runs natively narrow but fast.

59:15Sean Park: So it's very much copper-like. It's not micro-LED, it's not micro-Vixel, it's not indium-phosphide lasers. It's very much copper. And if it's very much copper, it uses very simple electronics like we looked at it in the podcast. It's just a chip and it just goes over a plastic cable and that's about it right there's no complex integration there's no putting three five materials like lasers you know you can't make silicon produce light and so you have to put all kinds of other materials indium phosphide gallium arsenide gallium nitride on top of silicon so much complexity so much integration problems this does not have any of that problem all you have is a silicon chip that's not even like cutting edge silicon it's like 55 nanometers i mean we could go to 22 nanometers and still get so much benefit but it's still not even a finfet let alone you know a gate all around three nanometer no it's none of that complexity it's a simple chip it works on simple electronics that is based on radio frequency stuff which is very very well established over many years of like chips and phones and we know how to do this stuff okay we really do and you can run this uh without any gearboxing chips because it runs natively at 200 gigs per lane so you can just like put it end to end and if it has like i don't know up to five meter reach yeah you can at least connect two racks and if you can have three meters you can even connect up stuff within a single rack and plastic is like much less weight and much more density is possible within a single scale up domain so it has all these advantages that like the optics world doesn't offer right now yeah interesting okay so i like you that you make the point there's no 3.5 material, there's no indium phosphide bottleneck, this is just silicon, it's older technology that could get built at a foundational node, you know, at many sort of trailing edge facilities.

1:01:17Sean Park: One question I have, so is that the antenna, is that also just silicon-based then? Yeah, it's completely integrated on the chip. So the beauty of this is that because of the frequency being 90 gigahertz or like 225 gigahertz the wavelength of the the wavelengths are actually pretty small which means that you don't have to have antennas external to the chip because antennas are always a function of wavelength like a quarter wavelength this could be an antenna right or a half wavelength so you've got different kinds of antennas and stuff so you can make these antennas on the chip because they are actually small enough at close to 100 gigahertz frequency.

1:01:58Sean Park: So everything is integrated. You've got a transmit and receiver, just antennas, and they're all on the chip. So all you do is take a chip and put it into the OSFP module. Done. That's it. Fascinating. What's very intriguing to me is Credo sort of invented this new market with AECs, and it was pretty much just plug and play. You just use the copper cable, but it has some DSPs, to help make sure that that signal can transmit further and be cleaned up and retimed if necessary and so on and so forth. But anyway, to the actual data center operator, it's sort of just plug and play. It's just like buy this and use it.

1:02:38Sean Park: Everything works. It kind of feels like what you're saying is that not only is these active RF cables simple to make, and like conceptually there's no big concerns about the materials or bottlenecks or anything, but it also feels like it's kind of just plug and play. Is that how, if you're a data center buyer, is that a fair statement? Yes, it's completely plug and play because the electrical interface is the only thing that the rack will see, right? As long as you can take the plug goes into the electrical side and it works. What happens beyond that is not anybody's problem, but the cable maker, right?

1:03:21Sean Park: Your cable maker's responsibility is to take this signal electrically from one place and deliver it electrically in the other place whether you want to do that with micro led or like optics or like rf it's not anybody's problem the concern is is it reliable i think sean mentioned in the podcast right like they are going to put this to the test right they want to make sure that it works because if you're going to pitch anything to the scale up domain stuff has to work because there are way way way way too many cables even in a single rack we are talking about 144 gpus will have above 20 000 cables you can't have any one of them fail and that's a single rack now multiply that amongst racks right like you know how many racks in a data center how many gpus are interconnected the reliability requirement of the cable is extraordinary and i don't think some this has been something that any technology has proven out at scale.

1:04:19Sean Park: Like we don't know if CPO can do that. We don't know if NPO can do that. No technology has that data right now. Like copper is the only thing that has worked. And we know that we can deploy a data center full of copper cables and it's going to work. So ultimately, data centers and like hyperscalers want to stay in copper as far as possible, but it's becoming extremely difficult. So the search for a new technology is on. Yes. Yes. Okay. Well, it sounds like reliability is the big thing. It sounds like the technology checks out. My thoughts around the cost being lower, that probably checks out just with the simple process node and keeping everything silicon.

1:05:02Sean Park: And even the plastic waveguide was quite simple. And then the mention of it actually reducing the amount of connections that you need, cables you need. So it feels like the cost checks out. Really, the question is reliability. And I think to your point, we're early in NPO deployments and CPO deployments, even like rack to switch or whatever. But obviously, the big question for point two and for this technology broadly is, will it be reliable when there's, you know, hundreds of thousands of these deployed and running constantly? Yeah, I fundamentally love the idea that there is another option that is not copper and not optics.

1:05:38Sean Park: And if it's RF, it's a bit closer to my heart, because that's my whole expertise that I have built over a couple of decades in the semi-industry. So personally, I'm rooting for this to work just because it's RF and I love RF. So let's see. Yeah. Exciting stuff. Exciting stuff. Let's see. All right, listeners, I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Point2 and our thoughts afterward. Leave us comments below, send us an email, and we'll see you in the next episode.

1:06:13Sell it is.