Mixx Technologies, a startup building co-packaged optic (CPO) technologies, unveiled an optical fiber connector it claims can terminate up to 24,576 fibers in a single rack unit.

The San Jose, California-based startup's first product is its SxC Connector designed to cover both the front and backplane, determining how much optical input/output (I/O) a system can support. Contending that the shift toward CPO first requires more radix out of the box than existing connectors can provide, Mixx bills its SxC unit as the initial system-level connectivity layer.

Each of Mixx's connectors scales up to 64 fibers – supporting both single-mode (SMF) and polarization-maintaining fiber (PMF) in the same form factor. Some 16 can be compiled for backplane deployments, which the startup claims can terminate 1,024 fibers in less than 800 square millimeters.

Around 24 would be needed for a single Open Compute Project (OCP)-compliant rack unit, which the vendor claims will provide four-times “the fiber density of miniature multifiber connector (MMC) very small form factor (VSFF), the highest-density connector platform qualified for deployment today, and what previously required a four-rack-unit enclosure with MMC connectors now fits in a single rack unit. That density is what makes the next step in CPO integration possible.”

Mixx was co-founded by Broadcom and Rockley Photonics alums Vivek Raghuraman and Rebecca Schaevitz.

Raghuraman serves as the startup’s CEO and was director for R&D in Broadcom's optical systems division. Raghuraman also spent more than seven years at Intel.

Schaevitz is Mixx’s chief product officer and was a principal engineer and product line manager at Broadcom. Schaevitz also spent time at Intel as an intern before going on to hold a series of roles at Corning and Lightmatter.

The pair founded a startup that finds itself in an increasingly crowded field of upstarts looking to commercialize the means to break data-movement bottlenecks for AI compute infrastructure. Mixx boasts R&D operations in India and Taiwan.

Its new connector forms a part of its wider multiterabit, high-radix optical interconnect architecture dubbed HBxIO. Analog mixed-signal innovations from Sophic Silicon were added to the platform following its acquisition by Mixx back in July.

"Every era of the data center has had a connector that carried it. Multifiber push-on (MPO) carried one generation, and VSFF carried the next, and each one arrived because the network behind it had changed shape. Inference has changed the shape again,” Raghuraman said. “What Mixx has built is not a denser version of the last connector. It is one ferrule technology that terminates the signal chain at the package, at the laser, at the backplane, and at the front panel, so the connectivity problem gets solved once instead of four times.”