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Silicon photonics market
• Silicon photonics has tremendous potential as a new technology to blend optical technology
with low cost CMOS semiconductor processing.
• But there are still many challenges ahead.
• The main problems in Silicon photonics development are:
1. Few products - most of the industry has been focused on developing individual silicon photonics
elements and cores. Few companies have developed integrated product solutions.
2. High cost – devices have been expensive to develop;
1. Silicon photonics companies have had to create their own CAE/CAD programs
2. Only in 2011, did open market CAE/CAD programs become available. Suppliers are very few in number
3. Several efforts have been established to promote CAE/CAD design tools. See OpSIS and LETI-Mentor
3. Technical miss-matches - with high volume markets
• Data centers want 850-nm and 1310-nm
• Consumers want very inexpensive products, but silicon photonics is still expensive
4. Competition with VCSEL-based alternatives
• VCSEL-based interconnects dominate both the data center and consumer areas with very low prices.
5. Need for high volumes - Manufacturing CMOS semiconductors is like the printing business where the
design costs are amortized over high volumes. The key to low costs are high volumes. Silicon Photonics
has not been able to achieve high enough volumes due to a number of constraints that impact costs.
• Most research so far has been in developing high-speed individual elements and cores
– Modulators, VOAs, switches, laser arrays, detector arrays, etc.
– Most of the core optical control elements have been developed
– Now about its about low power consumption, transmission characteristics and high data rates
– Not much development has gone into integrated “products” (except for a few startups)
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