ams OSRAM Joins SRMO Working Group to Advance AI Data Center Optical Interconnect Specifications

At the recent OCP Global Summit, ams OSRAM joined the Short Reach Micro-emitter Optics (SRMO) working group as one of its founding members, an initiative led by Credo.

The working group aims to develop an interoperable technical specification under the OCP framework, with submission for OCP approval planned for 2027. It covers link power consumption, energy efficiency, signal transmission, parallelism, module and connector package dimensions, and link budget.

The significance of this event is not that another major vendor has joined a standards body, but that the technology roadmap for optical interconnects in AI data centers is undergoing a meaningful fork.

SRMO's core proposition is to abandon pushing a small number of channels to extreme rates, and instead use large numbers of parallel micro-emitters operating at an "optimal per-device rate," reproducing the economics and latency characteristics of copper cabling in the optical domain.

Ashkan Seyedi, Vice President of the Optical Interconnect business unit at ams OSRAM, gave the quantitative target: a combination of wide, slow micro-emitters and micro-receivers can achieve 20 to 30 times the transmission distance of copper cabling while maintaining bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and cost efficiency comparable to copper.

The reason this value proposition is gaining industry response in 2026 is that the physical ceiling of copper cabling in scale-up networks is approaching. Traditional high-speed optical links solve the distance problem, but introduce additional power consumption and latency from optical-electrical conversion, DSPs, and retimers. What SRMO seeks to open up is precisely the middle ground between what copper "cannot reach" and what traditional optical modules make "uneconomical."

ams OSRAM's position in this roadmap is anchored by the 850 nm thin-film VCSEL platform it showcased at ECOC 2026. The platform achieved error-free operation at 32 Gb/s, energy efficiency of about 0.25 pJ/bit, and completed reliability validation exceeding 2,000 hours.

Notably, the platform is based on a GaAs material system and is compatible with the widely deployed OM3 multimode fiber infrastructure. It can switch between microLED short-reach links and microVCSEL longer-reach links according to application needs. This means SRMO is not building an ecosystem from scratch, but making incremental advances on the existing data center fiber physical layer. The connectorized multicore fiber solution co-exhibited with BizLink completes a key link from the light source to the fiber interface.

The motivations of lead company Credo also deserve scrutiny. In fiscal 2026, Credo reported revenue of $1.3351 billion, more than doubling year on year, with non-GAAP net income of $661.5 million. Its active electrical cable (AEC) business remains the foundation, but management has positioned the optics business as "the most important growth engine of the future," and expects optical DSPs, silicon photonics PICs, and ZeroFlap optical products each to contribute more than $100 million in revenue in fiscal 2027, with the optics portfolio totaling more than $600 million.

For ams OSRAM, joining SRMO carries strategic implications beyond a single product line. The underlying platform for its optical interconnect technology derives from the highly addressable micro-emitter arrays, CMOS integration, and wafer-level manufacturing capabilities proven in the EVIYOS? digital lighting solution, and the company has explicitly stated that it is extending this platform to AI infrastructure.

Risks also exist: standards development has always involved competing roadmaps and time costs; moving from light source supplier to standards platform provider also depends on multi-vendor interoperability validation, delivering yield and cost at hyperscale volume production, and the allocation of influence within the OCP governance process.

The short-term economics of copper cabling within the rack, and the established inertia of the USFP route in the pluggable ecosystem, will not automatically give way just because an SRMO specification is issued. Whether the "wide and slow" optical interconnect narrative can move from the ECOC demo floor into volume-production racks at hyperscale data centers, OCP approval in 2027 is only a starting point.