The markets for photonic integrated circuits in 2030

What will be the leading markets for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) by the decade's end? And what are the challenges facing the PIC industry?

SiLC Technologies' Lidar PIC. Source: SiLC Technologies.

A panel session at the recent PIC Summit Europe event held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, looked at what would be the markets for photonic integrated circuits by 2030.

The market for PICs is dominated by datacom and telecom. However, emerging applications include medical and wearable devices, optical computing, autonomous vehicles, and sensing applications for the oil, gas, water, and agriculture industries.

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Webinar: Scaling AI clusters with optical interconnects

A reminder that this Thursday, September 14th, 8:00-9:00 am PT, I will be taking part in a webcast as part of the OCP Educational Webinar Programme that explores the future of AI computing with optical interconnects.

Data and computation drive AI success, and the hyperscaler are racing to build massive AI accelerator-based compute clusters. The impact of large language models and ChatGPT has turbocharged this race. Scaling demands innovation in accelerator chips, node linkages, fabrics, and topology.

For this webinar, industry experts will discuss the challenge of scaling AI clusters. The other speakers include Cliff Grossner Ph.D., Yang Chen, and Bob Shine. To register, please click here 

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Ethernet Alliance on 800G and the next Ethernet rate

It may have taken the industry five years to get 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) modules shipping, but for Mark Nowell, Advisory Board Chair at the Ethernet Alliance, the long gestation period is understandable given the innovation that has been required.

Mark Nowell

The industry has had to cram complex technology into a small form factor for 400GbE while meeting the requirements of two very different end-customers: webscale players and communications service providers.

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Books in 2017

Gazettabyte has asked various industry executives to discuss the books they have read in 2017. Here two market researchers give their recommendations.

Andrew Schmitt, founder and lead analyst of Cignal AI

I didn’t have a good year with books. I bought more than these and either didn’t read them or I lost interest. Hopefully, 2018 will be better.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman was a big disappointment. It is a well-researched book and has tons of great history on Claude Shannon but there was something about the writing style that made it turgid. I struggled to finish it but learned a lot about Claude Shannon, including that his home in Boston wasn’t far from mine.

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Talking markets: Oclaro on 100 gigabits and beyond

Oclaro’s chief commercial officer, Adam Carter, discusses the 100-gigabit market, optical module trends, silicon photonics, and why this is a good time to be an optical component maker.

Oclaro has started its first quarter 2017 fiscal results as it ended fiscal year 2016 with another record quarter. The company reported revenues of $136 million in the quarter ending in September, 8 percent sequential growth and the company's fifth consecutive quarter of 7 percent or greater revenue growth.

Adam CarterA large part of Oclaro’s growth was due to strong demand for 100 gigabits across the company’s optical module and component portfolio.

The company has been supplying 100-gigabit client-side optics using the CFP, CFP2 and CFP4 pluggable form factors for a while. “What we saw in June was the first real production ramp of our CFP2-ACO [coherent] module,” says Adam Carter, chief commercial officer at Oclaro. “We have transferred all that manufacturing over to Asia now.”

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Intel's 100-gigabit silicon photonics move

Intel has unveiled two 100-gigabit optical modules for the data centre made using silicon photonics technology.

Alexis Bjorlin

The PSM4 and CWDM4/CLR4 100-gigabit modules mark the first commercial application of a hybrid integration technique for silicon photonics, dubbed heterogeneous integration, that Intel has been developing for years.

Intel's 100-gigabit module announcement follows the news that Juniper Networks has entered into an agreement to acquire start-up, Aurrion, for $165 million. Aurrion is another silicon photonics player developing this hybrid integration technology for its products. 

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