Silicon Photonics Will Shine in the Age of AI ....that's music to my ears...;)
Silicon photonics has become one of the key building blocks in the data center in recent years. It uses the power of photons to connect switches, servers, and other gear fast and efficiently over long distances.
But silicon photonics is bound to become more important as the demand for bandwidth continues to rise. Or that’s what the experts at imec, one of the world’s leading semiconductor research labs, will tell you.
For imec, it’s only a matter of time before silicon photonics starts taking responsibility for chip-to-chip connectivity between CPUs, GPUs, and other XPUs—where the “X” stands for any computer architecture that best suits the needs of a specific workload—at the heart of data centers and AI supercomputers.
For lane rates of 400 Gb/s, the SiPho toolbox needs a major upgrade. Especially on the transmission side, modulators with bandwidths of more than 100 GHz and sufficiently low optical losses are very hard to achieve in Si or Ge, which necessitates the introduction of “exotic” electro-optic materials. ☺️
Here's hoping that these updates ( where Lightwave is all between the lines ) comes in around the September timeframe. Would be nice to see.
Hello P.Power, I like this article very much. I agree that the sentence from IMEC you highlighted speaks volumes about the future of this tech. Did you have a chance to post it on the other board? I think it would be valuable for a lot of investors....