Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd. announced sample availability of its HiWire Pluggable Patch Panel (HiWire P3). The Credo HiWire P3 enables service providers and hyperscalers the freedom to dec couple pluggable optics from core switching and routing hardware using Credo's HiWire Active Electrical Cables (AECs). The HiWire P3 is a single rack unit (1RU), 32 port QSFP-DD appliance that allows standard pluggable optics to directly connect to an AEC without the use of a switch chip.

The HiWire P3 provides power, cooling, and controlplane access supporting three important use cases: Enabling coherent optics such as ZR+ to be used on lower-cost and smaller buffer switches which may currently lack the power and cooling envelope, or the software required to directly support them. Enabling switch and router port speeds to be decoupled from optics speed without having to slow ports down, thereby sacrifice radix and cost, through the use of speed shifting AECs. Enabling EDFA amplifiers to be hosted in HiWire P3 ports at lower-cost and lower-power overhead, rather than consuming valuable switch or router ports.