What Is Silicon Photonics and why is it important in Optical Transceivers?
August 15, 2022 - Silicon Photonics is a combination of two of the most important inventions of the 20th century—the silicon integrated circuit and the semiconductor laser. Photonics offers superior reach, bandwidth density, power consumption and latency in high-speed networks and provides rack-to-rack connectivity for data center applications including optical communications and telecommunications. Integrated photonics brings together the advantages of silicon photonics and CMOS circuits. By integrating the power of optical directly with compute, memory, and peripheral technologies, high bandwidth data can be moved throughout the entire network with significantly less power.
This ever-increasing movement of data from server to server is taxing the capabilities of today’s network infrastructure. The industry is quickly approaching the practical limits of electrical I/O performance. As demand continues to increase, electrical I/O power-performance scaling is not keeping pace and will soon limit available power for compute operations. This performance barrier can be overcome by integrating compute silicon and optical I/O.
To further reduce power, the next step for silicon photonics is to become more tightly integrated with other silicon. The first instantiation of this is co-packaged optics, expected in the next two years. The ultimate goal is fully integrated photonics, where the photonic integrated circuit is directly connected to the rest of the compute using advanced packaging
One of the differentiated features of Intel’s 300mm wafer silicon photonics platform is its integrated hybrid silicon laser. The new multiwavelength advancement enables the production of the optical source for future high-volume applications in the aforementioned co-packaged optics or optical interconnects, facilitating the growing bandwidth requirements of data-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Click here for more on Intel’s SiPH Optical Transceiver’s.
This ever-increasing movement of data from server to server is taxing the capabilities of today’s network infrastructure. The industry is quickly approaching the practical limits of electrical I/O performance. As demand continues to increase, electrical I/O power-performance scaling is not keeping pace and will soon limit available power for compute operations. This performance barrier can be overcome by integrating compute silicon and optical I/O.
To further reduce power, the next step for silicon photonics is to become more tightly integrated with other silicon. The first instantiation of this is co-packaged optics, expected in the next two years. The ultimate goal is fully integrated photonics, where the photonic integrated circuit is directly connected to the rest of the compute using advanced packaging
One of the differentiated features of Intel’s 300mm wafer silicon photonics platform is its integrated hybrid silicon laser. The new multiwavelength advancement enables the production of the optical source for future high-volume applications in the aforementioned co-packaged optics or optical interconnects, facilitating the growing bandwidth requirements of data-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Click here for more on Intel’s SiPH Optical Transceiver’s.
