Silicon photonics' second wave

• “I believe the field of silicon photonics is at a pivotal point of change and acceleration.” 

• Professor Roel Baets, the winner of the 2020 John Tyndall Award, talks about what motivates his research and his interests.

Two concentric circles drawn in chalk are shown on-screen. So Professor Roel Baets open his plenary talk at the European Conference on Integrated Optics (ECIO) 2020, asking the online audience what is being shown.

Professor Roel Baets

Suggestions come flooding in: the cross-section of an optical fibre, a silicon wafer, a ring resonator optical component and - the correct answer - a doughnut.

The image is from the front cover of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth, a UK professor of economics.

The author discusses how continual economic growth is out of kilter with the planet’s well-being and details alternative approaches. The “doughnut” represents a sweet-spot region ensuring sustainable growth.

Baets applied the book’s thinking to his plenary talk on the topic of silicon photonics research.

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Silicon photonics webinar

Daryl Inniss and I assess how the technology and marketplace has changed since we published our silicon photonics book at the end of 2016. Click here to view the webinar. Ours is the first of a series of webinars that COBO, the Consortium of On-Board Optics, is hosting.

And here is a copy of the slides, click here.

The IEEE gears up for the next Ethernet standard

Completing an Ethernet specification takes years of effort. Just ask John D’Ambrosia of Futurewei who has spent the last 15 years chairing various IEEE Ethernet standards.

John D'Ambrosia

He oversaw the standardisation of 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 200/400GbE and he is now chairing two IEEE Task Forces standards addressing 100 and 400 coherent Ethernet.

He is also the Chair of the group looking at new Ethernet applications (NEA) or to give it its full title, the IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections NEA Ad Hoc group.

D’Ambrosia is driving the development of the ‘Beyond 400 Gigabit’ Call-for-Interest work of the NEA group that will define the next Ethernet standard.

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Xilinx’s Versal Premium ready for the 800-gigabit era

When Xilinx was created in 1984, the founders banked on programmable logic becoming ever more attractive due to Moore’s law.

Making logic programmable requires extra transistors so Xilinx needed them to become cheaper and more plentiful, something Moore’s law has delivered, like clockwork, over decades.

Kirk SabanSince then, Xilinx’s field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices have advanced considerably.

Indeed, Xilinx’s latest programmable logic family, the Versal Premium, is no longer referred to as an FPGA but as an adaptive compute accelerator platform (ACAP).

The Versal Premium series of chips, to be implemented using TSMC’s 7nm CMOS process, was unveiled for the OFC 2020 show. The Premium series will have seven chips with the largest, the VP1802, having 50 billion transistors.

First devices will ship in the second half of 2021.

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Silicon Photonics spills over into new markets

Part 1: Yole market analysis

The market for silicon photonics is set to grow eightfold by 2025.

So claims market research firm, Yole Développement, in its latest report on silicon photonics, a technology that enables optical components to be made on a silicon substrate.

Silicon photonics is also being used in new markets although optical transceivers will still account for the bulk of the revenues in 2025.

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CW-WDM MSA charts a parallel path for optics

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have become an integral part of the businesses of the webscale players.

The mega data centre players apply machine learning to the treasure trove of data collected from users to improve services and target advertising.

They can also use their data centres to offer cloud-based AI services.

Training neural networks with data sets is so intensive that it is driving new processor and networking requirements.

It is also impacting optics. Optical interfaces will need to become faster to cope with the amount of data, and that means interfaces with more parallel channels.

Anticipating these trends, a group of companies has formed the Continuous-Wave Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CW-WDM) multi-source agreement (MSA).

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ADVA enables the sharing of spectrum at the optical layer

• Spectrum-as-a-service enables third parties to run networks over existing optical infrastructure.

• ADVA has also simplified linking systems to the metro-access network using self-tuning SFP+ optical modules.

ADVA has developed a scheme whereby communications service providers can sell unused fibre capacity to customers to design and run their own optical networks.

“Optical spectrum-as-a-service gives communications service providers tools to sell spectrum to someone else who now doesn’t need to build a parallel infrastructure,” says Jörg-Peter Elbers, ADVA’s senior vice president, advanced technology, standards and IPR.

 Jörg-Peter Elbers

ADVA has also developed a G.metro-compliant dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) scheme to simplify linking business parks, radio cell towers and small cells to a metro-access network.

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