JOHN WILLIAMSON SILICONPHOTONICS
SILICON PHOTONICS PASSES THE TIPPING POINT
di erent wavelengths of light for each channel. “This opens the door for the possibilities of achieving up to 1.6 Tbits/s in high speed data centres in the near future,” he suggests. SILICONMAKES LIGHT WORK Low power and tunability are other particular attractions of silicon photonics. “Chromatic dispersion is a dominant limitation in data transmission at higher rates as dispersion-limited reach is inversely proportional to the square of the data rate,” adds Kannan. “Silicon- based dispersion compensators o er tunability and lower power consumption capability, and can be easily integrated photonics o ers the overall advantages of a silicon technology such as low cost, higher integration, more functionalities embedded, higher interconnect density, and better reliability compared with legacy optics. Silicon photonics has significant advances over traditional optics such as wafer-scale manufacturing and test, along with attendant cost benefits. Semiconductor industry packaging and assembly techniques are used rather than custom low-volume optical packages points out Blum. “This fundamentally changes the cost structure of these optical interconnects,” he states. “And as data centre tra c continues to grow, silicon photonics will be a key enabling technology to meet future data centre demands, scaling to 400G and more highly integrated form factors.” But while silicon photonics may have substantial technical and operational benefits, there are a number of challenges associated with its wider development and use. In general, as remarked by Blum, many of the challenges are similar to traditional optics since today’s products with on-chip photonic devices.” Mounier also notes that silicon
With its immense potential for cost-e ective transformation of optical communications and data management, silicon photonics is coming of age, finds John Williamson
A lthough presently a potential. According to a study from BCC Research, the global market for photonic integrated circuits could increase from $539 million in 2017 to $1.8 billion in 2022 at a CAGR of 27.5% for the period. “Silicon photonics has been under development for years, but there are still only a few products on the market,” says Dr. Eric Mounier cofounder of the French market research company Yole Développement. “However, now that this technology is being pushed hard by large webcom companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Microsoft, we believe we have reached the tipping point that precedes massive growth.” NEED FOR SPEED A primary driver for silicon photonics development and deployment is the seemingly endless requirement to build higher capacity, faster networks and networking. “Big data is getting bigger rather modest business, the production and use of silicon photonics has major commercial
by the second. Transporting this level of data with existing technologies will soon reach its limit in terms of power consumption, density, and weight,” argues Dr. Mounier. “Photons will continue replacing electrons throughout networks, including in the data centre, the rack, and very soon on the board.” The need for more speed is increasingly acute in data centre operations. “Data centre tra c growth is driving the need for high-speed connectivity between servers and switches,” points out Robert Blum, Strategic Marketing and Business Development Director for Intel’s Silicon Photonics Product Division. “Given the scale of data centres, most of these connections require optical links, and this is driving an unprecedented demand for 100G transceivers today to alleviate existing networking bottlenecks. As an example of what could be in prospect from a capacity standpoint, Frost & Sullivan TechVision Research Analyst Naveen Kannan says Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) devices built by integrating silicon chips with optical fibres are capable of operating independently up to 40 channels, with
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| ISSUE 11 | Q4 2017
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