Outlook For Silicon Photonics

Outlook for Silicon Photonics – Ultrasonic Sprayer – Cheersonic

With the emergence of new data center applications such as artificial intelligence, the data interconnection market based on silicon photonics technology for data centers is also gradually heating up. March is a very lively month for silicon photonics technology. AMD/Xilinx just announced that it has cooperated with Ranovus to release a system that integrates Versal ACAP and Ranovus’ Odin optical communication modules. Marvell also released its 400G DR4 silicon Optical platform, and GlobalFoundries also released its silicon photonics process platform Fotonix. This article will do some analysis on the prospects of silicon photonics technology. We believe that silicon photonics technology will play an increasingly important role in data centers in the future, and its technological development will be towards lower cost and power consumption, and smaller volume. direction evolution.

Application of Silicon Photonics Technology in Data Center

Traditionally, optical-based communications are mainly used in long-distance high-speed communications. For example, the familiar fiber-optic broadband to the home is an important example of such long-distance high-speed wired communications. In data centers, a common data interconnection is communication based on copper cables.

However, in recent years, with the rise of applications such as artificial intelligence, data centers are also moving towards data interconnection based on optical communication. The main reason for this is that applications such as artificial intelligence have greatly increased the demand for data interconnection bandwidth, and conventional copper cable interconnection is increasingly difficult to meet the demand. For example, in artificial intelligence applications, a data center often needs to perform a large amount of distributed computing, and in distributed computing, a large amount of data is frequently exchanged between different servers, and the bandwidth of the data interconnection often limits the performance of the overall task. This is also a feature of the big data era, that is, in order to process massive data, the performance of data access is almost as important as the computing performance, and sometimes even more important; and as the scale of the algorithm becomes larger and larger, multiple servers need to be used for distribution. There are also more and more occasions for computing, so high-speed data interconnection between servers has become an extremely important core technology, and this has become the main reason for data centers to introduce ultra-high-bandwidth silicon photonics-based data interconnection. A few years ago, when artificial intelligence was just emerging, Nvidia introduced InfiniBand based on optical interconnection in machine learning training by virtue of its cooperation with Mellanox to facilitate high-performance training. Today, similar ultra-high-speed optical interconnection has almost become a data center. standard.

In the future, we believe that big data and artificial intelligence will continue to be the main drivers driving the data center market. Because of this, the demand for optical-based data interconnection in data centers is expected to further increase in the future, which will further increase the market size of silicon photonics. We have also seen that several giants in the semiconductor industry are actively deploying related silicon. photonic technology.

Silicon Photonics Technology and CMOS Chip Design

We believe that silicon photonics technology is currently undergoing an important technological innovation, the core technology of which is co-packaged optics (CPO) technology, which can be used to integrate silicon photonics modules and ultra-large-scale CMOS chips into a closer It is packaged together in the form of , thereby further improving the optical interconnect technology in data center applications in terms of cost, power consumption and size.

CPO technology mainly refers to the integration of silicon photonics modules and CMOS chips in the form of advanced packaging (such as 2.5D or 3D packaging). Before the rise of CPO technology, the current traditional technology is to separate the silicon photonics module and the CMOS chip into two separate modules, and then connect them together on the PCB board. The advantage of doing this is that the design is more modular, and the CMOS chip or silicon photonics module can be replaced separately if there is a problem, but it is disadvantageous in terms of power consumption, size and cost. For example, since the output of the silicon photonics module is ultra-high-speed data, which is connected to the CMOS chip using a PCB board, it will encounter large signal loss, so it requires a lot of power consumption to support high data rates. In addition, the cost of designing a PCB that supports ultra-high-speed signals also requires high overhead, and in terms of size, discrete silicon photonics modules and CMOS chips are usually less integrated, which also limits the further improvement of servers in data centers. density.

And CPO is the technology to solve these problems. When using advanced packaging technology to integrate the silicon photonics module and the CMOS chip into the same package, first of all, the data connection quality (signal loss) between the silicon photonics module and the CMOS chip is much improved compared to the PCB board, so it can Reduce power consumption; on the other hand, advanced packaging can also bring cost improvements after mass production. Finally, after using CPO, since they are all integrated in the same package, the integration of the overall system is greatly improved and the size is reduced, so it can also improve the popularity of silicon photonics technology in data center application scenarios.

At present, many giants with investment in the field of silicon photonics are vigorously developing CPO technology. As mentioned above, ultra-high-speed interconnection brought by silicon photonics technology is the core technology of distributed high-performance computing such as artificial intelligence. Therefore, companies with data centers as the main market, such as Nvidia and AMD, have a lot of layout and investment in CPO. Since Nvidia acquired Mellanox, it has further strengthened its capabilities in high-performance optical interconnects, and in terms of CPO, Nvidia has also announced its current research technology, that is, using CPO technology to integrate GPU and silicon photonics chips in the same one. In the package, it supports 24 channels of NVLINK at the same time, thus realizing the ultra-high-speed interconnection of 4.8Tbps.

AMD, which directly competes with Nvidia in the data center, is also vigorously deploying CPO technology. We believe that the recently announced cooperation with Ranovus is an important investment by AMD in CPO. Ranovus is an important technology innovation company in the field of CPO. The CPO technology jointly developed by Ranovus, TE Connectivity, IBM and Senko has now realized the integration of silicon photonics modules and transceiver modules in the same chip with a high degree of integration (rather than conventional In the CPO technology, the silicon photonics module and the transceiver module are still two separate chips), thus achieving better integration and performance. Ranovus calls its unique technology CPO 2.0, and we also expect AMD to further enhance its capabilities in the data center optical interconnect field by partnering with Ranovus.

In addition to Nvidia and AMD, which are mainly used for their own high-performance computing systems, important network communication providers such as Broadcom and Marvell have also invested a lot in the field of silicon photonics and CPO. Marvell just released its 400G DR4 silicon photonics chip at OFC conference, with a high level of integration, including transceiver modules and laser driver modules, the chip is integrated through CPO technology and Marvell’s Teralynx network switches to achieve ultra-high data bandwidth.

Process Platform for Silicon Photonics Technology

In terms of process, GlobalFoundries is probably the most aggressive of the several mainstream foundries in terms of investment in silicon photonics technology. In terms of silicon photonics technology, GlobalFoundries has been actively deploying since a few years ago. Currently, it can provide advanced silicon photonics process platforms, including various optical waveguides, phase shifters, polarizers, photodiodes, etc., in addition to silicon photonics technology. In addition, GlobalFoundries also offers advanced packaging options to help customers implement CPO technology. In the Fotonix platform just released by GlobalFoundries, it further integrates silicon photonics and CMOS on the same chip, so as to achieve higher performance and integration. According to the information released by GlobalFoundries, the current customers of its Fotonix platform include Broadcom, Marvell, Nvidia, Cisco, Ranovus and other important manufacturers in the field of silicon photonics, and the future prospects are promising.

In addition to GlobalFoundries, Intel is also actively laying out the process technology of silicon photonics. In the high-speed network switching chip market, Intel is pushing its Tofino solution, which also includes self-developed silicon photonics technology and advanced packaging technology. Intel actually has a relatively deep accumulation of technology in these two fields. Six years ago, the current Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger (then vice president) was pushing silicon photonics technology, and believed that silicon photonics will definitely become a mainstream technology in the future. With Intel’s accumulation in the field of silicon photonics process and packaging technology, we believe that Intel will also become a strong competitor in this field in the future.

All in all, we believe that in the future, the main technological evolution of silicon photonics will focus on higher integration and packaging with CMOS chips, and advanced silicon photonics manufacturing process and packaging technology will become the core technology support for the evolution of silicon photonics technology. .

Original: Li Fei

Cheersonic is the leading developer and manufacturer of ultrasonic coating systems for applying precise, thin film coatings to protect, strengthen or smooth surfaces on parts and components for the microelectronics/electronics, alternative energy, medical and industrial markets, including specialized glass applications in construction and automotive.