Optical Circuit Switch

Overview

An optical circuit switch (OCS) routes optical signals as complete circuits without conversion to electrical signals, enabling reconfigurable, low-latency, high-bandwidth optical paths between compute nodes. IOWN Global Forum's position is that co-packaged optics (CPO) in today's leaf-spine packet infrastructure cannot reach its full potential when simply substituting for pluggable transceivers; instead, combining CPO-based optical I/O with optical circuit switches is the preferred approach to unlock CPO's advantages for AI accelerator interconnect.

OCS is central to IOWN's new AI accelerator interconnect work item targeting scale-up and scale-out AI networking. OCP launched an OCS subgroup at the 2025 Global Summit, which IOWN identified as a natural complement to its own AI interconnect work item. The proposed collaboration model positions IOWN to develop functional architecture and vertical use cases for OCS-enabled AI interconnect while OCP develops the product specifications and engages implementers.