Micro-Emitter-Based, Pluggable Solution Targets Scale-Out and Front-End Connectivity Up to 50m with Copper-Class Reliability at Lower Power and Reduced Cable Bulk

Company Website: https://www.credosemi.com
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- (Business Wire)

Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd (Credo) (NASDAQ: CRDO), an innovator in providing connectivity at scale through fast, reliable, and energy-efficient system solutions, today shared details of its 1.6T ZeroFlap active light cable (ALC), the industry’s first row-scale, wide-parallel optical interconnect solution built for AI scale-out and front-end networks.

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Credo's ZeroFlap Active Light Cable (ALC) is based on a dense array of micro-emitters and photodetectors coupled with flexible, lightweight fiber bundles, designed to draw 12W per cable-end in a pluggable form factor. With targeted reach up to 50m alongside 100 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF), Credo’s ZeroFlap ALC is designed to deliver the reliability, power efficiency, and reach required for next-generation AI infrastructure.

The ZeroFlap ALC is based on a dense array of micro-emitters and photodetectors coupled with flexible, lightweight fiber bundles, designed to draw 12W per cable-end in a pluggable form factor. With targeted reach up to 50m alongside 100 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF), Credo’s ZeroFlap ALC is designed to deliver the reliability, power efficiency, and reach required for next-generation AI infrastructure. The 1.6T ALC architecture will be featured in Credo’s booth at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit this week in San Jose.

News Highlights

• Credo's ZeroFlap ALC will bring wide-parallel, micro-emitter optics to row-scale reach, closing the mid-reach gap between copper's distance limits and the power and cost overhead of traditional pluggable optics.
• The cable splits 200G lanes into many low-rate optical channels using simple NRZ modulation, avoiding the power and latency costs of complex DSP-based signal processing.
• Built-in channel redundancy and ZeroFlap link monitoring enable hitless failover, with target reliability of 100 million hours MTBF and bit error rates better than traditional optics.
• The ZeroFlap ALC is designed to draw 12W per cable-end, roughly 30% less than comparable active electrical cables (AECs), is 10x lighter than AECs and extends the reach to 50m enabling row-scale connectivity.

As AI clusters expand across data center rows, operators need connectivity that combines greater reach with reliable, energy-efficient operation. Credo’s 1.6T ZeroFlap ALC will extend the reliability principles behind its field-proven AEC solutions to a new optical architecture. Micro-emitter technology harnesses optical arrays that make up the transmit side of a link. Rather than pushing a few optical channels to extreme data rates, many micro-emitters operate in parallel at optimal individual speeds. This shift from “fast-and-narrow” to “slow-and-wide” enables lower power per bit along with optical links protected with redundancy.

“For decades, optical transceivers have prioritized data rate per fiber. Our 1.6T ZeroFlap ALCs are engineered with reliability as the first-order concern,” said L.K. Bhupathi, Associate Vice President of Product at Credo. “The scale-up and scale-out links that form the densest connections in AI data centers demand higher reliability than traditional optics were designed to provide. Credo’s ALCs bring copper-class reliability to these links, enabling larger GPU clusters and higher-throughput connectivity for massive-scale AI deployments.”

“As the speeds and distances required for AI exceed the capabilities of copper, there is a gap opening between copper cables and more expensive, power-hungry traditional pluggable optics," said Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst, Optical Components at Cignal AI. "Credo’s ZeroFlap ALC addresses this gap with a unique approach that provides row-scale reach while maintaining the reliability and low-cost benefits of AECs.”

Credo’s 1.6T ZeroFlap active light cable (ALC) solution will be shipping in 2027.

Today, at the OCP Global Summit, Credo President and CEO Bill Brennan will present “Wider. Slower. Better: Optics That Can Beat Copper” at 3:20 p.m. in room LL21DE of the San Jose Convention Center. Credo’s micro-emitter technology and its latest portfolio of copper and optical interconnect solutions will be demonstrated at the OCP Global Summit Expo Hall in Credo Booth B2, October 13-15, 2026.

To request a meeting or product demo, please contact sales@credosemi.com.

About Credo

Credo’s mission is to transform connectivity at scale through fast, reliable, and energy-efficient system solutions. Our high-speed copper and optical interconnect technologies deliver industry-leading power and performance from chip to cluster to meet the ever-expanding data infrastructure demands of AI.

Our vertically integrated connectivity portfolio is comprised of our flagship purple ZeroFlap (ZF) Active Electrical Cables (AECs) and ZF optical transceivers; optical components including silicon photonics-based photonic integrated circuits (SiPho PICs) and DSPs; OmniConnect AI memory and chip-to-chip interconnect; and retimers for Ethernet and PCIe—supported by our PILOT diagnostic and analytics software platform. Credo innovations enable our customers to connect the systems that connect the world.

For more information, please visit https://www.credosemi.com. Follow Credo on LinkedIn.

Credo, the Credo logo and the color purple when associated with AECs are registered trademarks of Credo Technology Group Limited in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners.

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Contacts:

Media Contact:
Kristin Hehir
kristin.hehir@credosemi.com

Investor Contact:
Dan O’Neil
dan.oneil@credosemi.com

Source: Credo