It’s no secret silicon photonics faces wide-ranging challenges, including hybrid integration, finding new materials with added functionality to meet demands for high-speed modulation, and working with silicon CMOS foundries. And everyone you ask about these topics is likely to have a different opinion.
Intel started developing silicon photonics back in 2000, “so we’re in our 23rd year of developing them,” says Robert Blum, head of Silicon Photonics Strategy, Intel Foundry Services, Intel Corp.
The telecom industry is running into bandwidth issues at the edge, but it took quite a while for this problem to materialize. “When we look at computer workloads, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning workloads are really the prime use case we’ll see optics developed to truly scale. When every CPU and GPU has an optical tile and massive amounts of data going in and out of the chip—and also going significant distances because these highly meshed architectures have multiple GPUs or CPUs clustered together—we simply won’t be able to do it electrically anymore. This will be a turning point for the industry, and it’s just a few years away.”
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