Slow day, so I dug around.
While the company (LWLG) states that GIG is their nearest competitor, many here have noted GIG straying into new categories and no mention of new material development or any competitive development lately.
I was trying to find out more about what Lebby meant with the phrase from his presentation.....
"the ability to integrate modulator onto silicon photonics or InP platform for Mux/Demux and spot-size converters" and I found this paper titled: Serial 100 Gb/s connectivity based on polymer photonics and InP-DHBT electronics
Within the introduction (this is published in 2012), it says:
So far, two optical modulator technologies have shown a strong potential for 100 Gb/s NRZ-OOK operation: the InP travelling wave electro-absorption modulators (InP-TWEAMs) and the polymer-based Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs) relying either on a silicon organic hybrid structure or on a monolithic electro-optic (EO) polymer structure]. Compared to the InP-TWEAMs, the polymer-based MZMs can have faster response and the clear advantage of being able to additionally support higher-order formats involving both intensity and phase modulation. Their 100 Gb/s potential has been shown extensively in the past through bandwidth measurements, and was recently confirmed with digital data in the case of monolithic EO polymer MZMs.
So this paper speak of polymer-based solutions being preferable.
Then I looked up the latest on the page from Lebby's presentation about research resurgence. This was from 2015 and was Dalton's work at the UW.
The first line of the white paper reads...
"Energy-efficient electro-optic modulators are at the heart of short-reach optical interconnects, and silicon photonics is considered the leading technology for realizing such devices. However, the performance of all-silicon devices is limited by intrinsic material properties. In particular, the absence of linear electro-optic effects in silicon renders the integration of energy-efficient photonic–electronic interfaces challenging. Silicon–organic hybrid (SOH) integration can overcome these limitations by combining nanophotonic silicon waveguides with organic cladding materials,"
This second and most recent paper speaks of the limitations of silicon, while stating a silicon-organic hybrid might address short reach interconnects.
By no means did I capture all the pertinent details from these papers, but I wouldn't say the competitive white papers did anything but support our own efforts while acknowledging that polymers can address the stated issues.
