Optical Internetworking Forum

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) is a prominent non-profit consortium that was founded in 1998. It promotes the development and deployment of interoperable computer networking products and services through implementation agreements (IAs) for optical networking products and component technologies including SerDes devices.

OIF also creates benchmarks, performs worldwide interoperability testing, builds market awareness and promotes education for optical technologies. The Network Processing Forum merged into OIF in June, 2006.

The OIF has around a hundred member companies and has four face-to-face meetings per year. It is managed by Association Management Solutions and operates using parliamentary debate rules and transparent decision making. The technical content is member-driven.

Implementation agreements are based on requirements developed cooperatively by end users, service providers, equipment vendors and technology providers in alignment with worldwide standards, augmented as necessary. This is accomplished through industry member participation working together to develop specifications for external network element interfaces, software interfaces internal to network elements and hardware component interfaces internal to network elements.

OIF sponsors a technical committee and a market awareness and education committee. The technical committee has the following working groups:

The Common Electrical I/O (CEI) Interoperability Agreement is for 3.125, 6, 11, 25-28 Gbps, and 56 Gbps high speed electrical interfaces. This CEI specification has defined SerDes interfaces for the industry since 2006. It has been highly influential. The OIF's CEI family of interfaces plus its predecessors are the seventh generation, its seventh doubling in rate of high speed electrical interfaces beginning with SPI-3 in 2000. The current generation, CEI-56G defines five reaches of 56 Gb/s interfaces. The OIF has begun work on its eighth generation of interface with its CEI-112G project. CEI has influenced or has been adopted or adapted in many other serial interface standards by many different standards organizations over its long lifetime. SerDes interfaces have been developed based on CEI for most ASIC and FPGA products.

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