Silicon Photonics—Growing as a Standard for Datacom's While Enabling Consumer Healthcare and Lidar Automotive

With booming data traffic, hyperscale data centers are driving increases in both transmission rates and computing capabilities. Silicon photonics (SOI based) keeps expanding its position across the market by consolidating its adoption for the pluggable transceivers with 100GbE and 400GbE in high-volume. It’s clearly opening a technological window in more evolved co-packaged optics solutions for next-generation servers and switch architectures. A growing number of legacy optics key players are gradually, but relentlessly, converting to the adoption of silicon photonics via the introduction of hybrid modules combining SOI- and InP- based devices and circuits. With the scale-up of Ethernet switch system architectures as well as the need for high-performance computing, the datacoms industry is moving forward. The industry is highly considering to use the co-packaging (CPO) of silicon photonics chiplets with CMOS ICs for ASICs, CPU, and GPUs. In this sense, optical and digital technologies are converging to offer disruptive architectures in the midterm horizon. Beyond datacoms applications, the inherent benefits of silicon photonics envision novel applications in the consumer with sensing devices for healthcare monitoring or LiDAR tech for automotive or robotic markets. Gathering top-notch players of the datacom and sensing industry, this workshop provides a 360 overview of the actual technological and market trends for silicon photonics with a vision on the ecosystem and applications.