An optical module is a device specifically designed for data transmission, converting electrical signals into optical signals and vice versa. It is installed in switches, servers, and network interface cards, enabling high-speed data transmission such as 100G, 400G, or 800G. An optical module is a typically hot-pluggable optical transceiver used in high-bandwidth data communications applications. Optical modules typically have an electrical interface on the side that connects to the inside of the system and an optical interface on the side that connects to the outside. For GPUs, AI accelerators, and high-performance CPUs in large-scale clusters, optical modules have become inevitable. The core reason is that as computing performance scales rapidly, the real system bottleneck shifts from compute power to interconnect bandwidth.
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