2021 Photonic Symposium Recap

Lisa Huff, Senior Principal Analysis of Optical Components at Omdia, presented a market analysis of the largest integrated photonics transceivers market for data communications in and between data centers. Huff discussed industry revenue growth from cloud data centers and the shift to 400Gbps transceivers with plans for 600Gbps and 800Gbps in the next five years to support ever-growing bandwidth requirements. Of key interest was the shift to coherent architectures for communications between data centers and associated interconnect architectural changes.

Huff’s discussion was echoed by Rob Stone, Facebook Technical Sourcing Manager, who gave a unique view into how data center providers are working to manage growing bandwidth requirements while keeping within the power budgets of the physical data center facilities.

Stone’s presentation noted an important shift in data center bandwidth consumption from compute, storage, and memory traffic to machine-to-machine traffic driven by the utilization of specialized hardware accelerators for video processing, machine learning, and AI inferencing training.

The increased bandwidth requirements of this new traffic are driving up power consumption in the data centers to critical stages. Data center providers are looking to move to co-packaged optics to reduce power consumption back down to acceptable levels. Stone noted that datacenter service providers need robust supplier eco-systems to move to co-packaged optics and encouraged the audience to participate in standardization efforts to enable a robust supplier ecosystem.

Robert Blum, Director of Strategic Marketing and Business Development at Intel, presented the company’s integrated photonics offerings. He noted that Intel has now shipped over 5 million 100G transceiver units. Intel’s technology allows for heterogenous integration of lasers and semiconductor optical amplifiers on their silicon photonics platform, which enables integrated LiDAR solutions used in ADAS and autonomous vehicle systems.

Blum outlined advances by Intel’s Mobile Eye division, which has introduced multiple independent sub-systems for hands-free driving to address Level-4 “eyes-off” reliability and MTBF (mean time between failure) requirements.

This was followed by two presentations covering integrated photonics in healthcare and bio-sensing that promise to revolutionize these industries.

Aaron Zilkie, Rockley Photonics CTO, described Rockley’s full-stack integrated photonic solution for a multi-function “Clinic on the Wrist,” which can be powered by over 100 unique lasers on a chip. Rockley’s solution enables a spectrograph-on-a-chip application that rivals the capabilities of hardware in lab environments. One of the technology’s most impressive features is its ability to monitor glucose levels without the need to draw blood from the patient! Rockley Photonics offers not only the chipset but also a complete software stack for both data collection and big data analysis to help turn the data collected into actionable decisions.

Ed Preisler, Director of Technology Development at Tower Semiconductor, outlined the contents of Tower’s silicon photonics-based PDK, including interesting features of their passive elements, optical modulators, photo detectors and couplers. Preisler highlighted Tower’s use of a triple etch process to enable lower loss waveguides and grating structures with small enough features for C & O band laser tuning while still using lower cost lithography associated with 180nm CMOS processes.

Tower has a novel approach to enhance the capabilities of thermal phase shifters by removing silicon above and below the waveguide and heater to keep heat from leaking into the substrate for the phase shifters. Preisler discussed Tower’s unique capabilities for enabling advanced packaging of integrated photonic ICs, such as the addition of v-grooves for passive alignment of fibers to edge couplers and support for thru-silicon vias to enable stacking of electronic die on photonic die for intimate RF connections between drivers and modulators. Of equal importance was Tower’s ability to establish a trench and pedestal structure for integrating III-V laser die with the silicon photonics platform.

Twan Korthorst concluded Day 1 of the Symposium with an overview of the Synopsys suite of electronic and photonic design automation (EPDA) solutions. Korthorst emphasized that the Synopsys photonic design platform leverages existing Synopsys technology in all phases of the design flow, including electro-optical design, schematic capture and schematic-driven-layout, electrical-optical co-simulation and integrated electronic and photonic physical verification.

On Day 2 of the Symposium, Dr. Luis Orbe, Synopsys Application Engineer, walked through the Synopsys photonic design flow and demonstrated how designers can develop custom photonic building blocks with the Photonic Device Compiler solution to use with existing foundry-specific PDKs. Once the new building block is created, Photonic Device Compiler is used to characterize the building block and create a compact simulation model for circuit-level simulations, plus the symbol and layout information for implementation.

Dr. Orbe also demonstrated the new building block in the OptoCompiler flow to build a 4-channel CWDM single-chip transceiver design including electro-optical co-simulation of the design, layout and post-layout simulation, followed by DRC and LVS checking.

Dr. Orbe concluded his demonstrations by presenting results from manufacturing the design using the Tower Semiconductor PH18 silicon photonics process. He showed close correlation between the performance of the manufactured design and the performance as predicted by OptSim simulations.

How to Access Photonic Symposium Presentations On Demand

Select Photonic Symposium presentations and demonstrations are available for viewing on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb_8aNxGqyE0otxue42xMRKnT0TNyJ2dc.