Silicon photonics technology is unfamiliar to ordinary people, but it has attracted giant companies such as Apple, Nvidia, and TSMC to invest in research and development in recent years. It is the combination of the two most important inventions of the 20th century, “Silicon Photonics” is a compound of “semiconductor laser” and “silicon semiconductor circuits”.
Why do we need silicon photonics?
One of the major reasons driving the development of silicon photonics technology and becoming an emerging potential market is the demand for optical communications. It is becoming more and more difficult to continue Moore’s Law. Post-nano-level breakthroughs face many obstacles such as extremely high manufacturing costs and technical difficulties in quantum tunneling.
Silicon photonics technology is a technology that integrates optical components such as laser devices with silicon-based integrated circuits to achieve high-speed data transmission, longer transmission distances and low power consumption through light instead of electrical signals. Additionally, it provides lower latency.
As the demand for data transmission efficiency and computing performance continues to increase rapidly, integrating optoelectronic components through the semiconductor process can not only increase component density, increase overall operating efficiency, and reduce energy consumption, but also achieve effective cost reduction benefits. .
With the increasing demand for massive computing in fields such as AI, communications, and self-driving cars, under the premise of Moore’s Law, the technological evolution of integrated circuits has reached physical limits. How to break through? That is towards light. Currently, many domestic and foreign manufacturers are actively deploying silicon photonics technology. When electronics are combined with photons, it not only solves the loss problem of original signal transmission, it is even regarded as opening a new chapter of Moore’s Law and subverting the future world. key technologies.
Electrical signals must be directed toward optical signals in order to effectively significantly improve the efficiency of transmitting a staggering amount of data.
In this big topic, silicon photonics plays a key role.
What is silicon photonics?
Silicon Photonics refers to integrated chips that are transmitted by changing “electrical signals” to “optical signals” to simultaneously solve the previously mentioned problems of increasing transmission distance, increasing data bandwidth, and reducing unit performance. It consumes three purposes.
Because light itself has no charge or mass, signals in the same channel do not interfere with each other, and the loss/heat generation is low, which is far superior to technology based on copper wire conduction. The general optical communication transmission wavelength is between 1,310~1,550nm, silicon will not absorb this wavelength; the SOI (Silicon On Insulator) technology used is also highly compatible with the traditional silicon process, which can effectively reduce cost.
Integrated circuits (ICs) shrink hundreds of millions of transistors onto a single chip to perform various complex operations. Silicon photonics is an integrated “light” circuit that concentrates all the circuits that can guide light. To put it simply, it converts “electrical signals” in the chip into “optical signals” on a silicon platform to conduct electrical and optical signals.
Silicon photonics submarket
SEMI
Forecast data from the International Semiconductor Industry Association (SEMI) shows that by 2030, the global silicon photonics semiconductor market is expected to reach US$7.86 billion, with a compound annual growth rate expected to reach 25.7%, a significant increase from only US$1.26 billion in 2022. , with great growth potential.
Mordor Intelligence
The forecast data of Mordor Intelligence, a well-known research institution, is more conservative. The silicon photonics market size is expected to be US$1.49 billion in 2023. The agency predicts that it will reach US$4.54 billion by 2028. During the forecast period (2023-2028), the compound annual growth rate is 24.98%.
Yole
According to forecasts from market research agency Yole, the size of the silicon photonics market (calculated on bare wafers) will climb from US$152 million in 2021 to US$927 million in 2027. For many fields that have entered the development plateau, The silicon photonics market is just about to take off, with a compound annual growth rate of 36%.
Markets and Markets
In 2015, according to research by Markets and Markets, the global silicon photonics market was still in its infancy, with a scale of approximately US$217.6 million; but in 2022, the market could break through the threshold of US$1 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 25.7 %.
If divided by region, since the world’s major CSP data centers are still concentrated in the North American market, this market accounts for 35.7%; the Asia-Pacific region is the second concentrated region, accounting for 31.5%.
Technical challenges and development bottlenecks of silicon photonics
There are many main challenges for silicon photonics in “module integration”; first of all, the cost of the silicon photonics device itself must be competitive, otherwise there will be no room to coexist with optical communication devices, and the advantages of the silicon process cannot be demonstrated. Advantages; Furthermore, the size of optical components such as waveguides is usually fixed, but silicon-based components have been shrinking. There is a gap of more than ten times in internal size between the two, making it difficult to combine.
Silicon photonics still has many challenges in component integration, including communication language issues. For example, although semiconductor manufacturers understand the electrical manufacturing process, because the performance of photonic components is sensitive to temperature and path, the line width and line width in the manufacturing process are very sensitive.
Distance has a considerable impact on optical signals. If we want to develop more efficient photonic component structures and processes, we need a communication platform to provide design specifications, materials, parameters, etc., and integrate the information language of optoelectronic manufacturers.
Furthermore, short-term silicon photonics is used in niche markets, and various types of packaging processes and material standards are still being established. Most of the foundries that provide silicon photonic chips off the production line are customized services. Or it is inconvenient to provide it to other manufacturers for use.
The lack of a unified platform may hinder the development of silicon photonics technology. In addition to the lack of a common platform mentioned above, high-cost manufacturing, light source integration, component efficiency, material matching, thermal effects and reliability are also among the bottlenecks of the silicon photonics process. With the continuous advancement and innovation of technology, it is expected that these bottlenecks will be broken within the next few years to ten years.
Silicon photonic light source form
The technology of using CMOS standard process technology to produce silicon-based integrated optical components on SOI substrates is currently in a mature stage. However, the only laser light source part still cannot be directly epitaxially produced using silicon substrates because the silicon itself It is an indirect band gap material and cannot emit light.
Therefore, the development of light sources comes from the outside world. The light sources must be assembled and integrated with integrated circuits through packaging. Therefore, the optoelectronic integration benefits of silicon photonics technology are not yet complete. Laser light sources Becoming one of the biggest challenges currently.
There are various ways to integrate lasers and silicon integrated circuits. According to development, there are three main ways to form a light source. Among them, flip chip technology (Flip Chip) and wafer bonding (Wafer Bonding) have been used in production lines and are relatively mature process technologies. However, direct epitaxy in silicon photonic integrated circuits has the highest flexibility. It is the technical method with the lowest cost potential, so academic and R&D are still working in this direction.
Application areas
Data transmission
Silicon photons use light to transmit, which can solve the following two major problems. If the current data transmission is changed from electrical signals to silicon photonics to transmit optical signals, it will not only greatly improve the transmission efficiency but also significantly reduce the energy consumption of transmission, further improving the heat consumption problem.
- The first is that the current transmission speed is not fast enough. The chip’s computing power is always improved, but when the transmission speed cannot keep up with the computing speed, data transmission will be delayed or traffic jams occur. In this way, no matter how much computing power there is, it will be limited.
- The second is that when data is transmitted between servers, there will be losses caused by data transmission, which will lead to problems of heat dissipation and energy consumption. If the demand for AI deployment increases, there will inevitably be more servers, and the heat dissipation and energy loss associated with transmission loss will be a considerable problem.
Non-invasive blood glucose detection
Equipping wearable devices with glucose detection functions is a goal that major technology companies are working towards, and Apple is one of the representatives. In order to develop this feature, Apple collaborated with Rockley Photonics, a British silicon photonics startup. Later, the partnership was terminated. After Rockley Photonics filed for bankruptcy, Apple was reported to have made great progress in the non-invasive glucose detection function.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple uses silicon photonics technology. The technical principle is to emit light of a specific wavelength through a laser, irradiate the area under the skin where the tissue is absorbed by glucose, and reflect it back to the sensor, displaying Show the concentration of glucose. It is reported that the silicon photonic chips and sensors will be manufactured by TSMC.
LiDAR
From the perspective of sensing applications, silicon photonics has also received attention in the fields of self-driving cars and drone applications. The high sensing accuracy of LiDAR is regarded as the key to the development of self-driving cars. However, current development is still limited by high cost and technical complexity. If silicon photonics technology is applied in the future, it is expected that It can effectively reduce the size of components mounted on the electric motor and reduce costs.
Fiber optic gyroscope
The other is the use of high-end gyroscopes on drones. In the past, due to their large size and high cost, they could not be mounted on general commercial drones. By using silicon photonics technology, fiber optic gyroscopes will It is expected to significantly reduce the cost and size, and it is expected to see the adoption of fiber optic gyroscopes on consumer drone devices in the future.
Photon computing
In addition, the development of quantum computing and communications is also expected to be driven by silicon photonics. According to statistics from Yole, among the application fields of silicon photonics, photonic processing will almost not exist from 2021 to In 2027, silicon photonics will rise to the second largest application field, and the market related to consumer health will jump to the third largest application field. Other areas with strong growth momentum include those actively developed by front-end manufacturers. Co-packaged engines, immunoassay, optical interconnects and other fields.
Trends among manufacturers and countries
USA
Spearheaded by IBM, which became actively involved 20 years ago. Since then, many companies, research units, and academia have invested in it. Among them, Intel has already invested in this technology for more than 10 years. Intel is the fastest to launch mass production products, with a market share of even 50%.
At the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) in June 2024, Intel’s Integrated Photonic Solutions (IPS) group demonstrated the industry’s most advanced and first fully integrated optical computing interconnect (OCI) chipset, the first The OCI chip supports 64 independent channels. Each channel can transmit data at a rate of 32 gigabits per second (Gbps) and efficiently transmit data over optical fibers up to 100 meters long.
It is expected to meet the AI infrastructure’s demand for higher bandwidth, There is a growing demand for lower power consumption and longer transmission distances. It enhances the connection between CPUs and GPUs in the cluster and supports innovative computing architectures such as consistent memory expansion and resource decoupling.
Leti, Imec, and Ime are research units that have been deeply involved in this field for a long time; on the design side, there are Mellanox acquired by Nvidia, Luxtera acquired by Cisco, and Acacia, Finisar, Arista, Broadcom, Marvell, and Ranovus , AMD and other companies have already invested in research and development.
Chip foundry
In the wafer manufacturing sector, GF was the first to invest, while TSMC has been actively deploying related technologies in recent years. In 2017, it jointly developed a new generation of silicon photonics technology with Luxtera, and later also deployed COUPE (compact universal) in the packaging segment. photonic engine, compact universal photonic engine) heterogeneous integration technology of silicon photonic chips.
There are reports in the industry that TSMC is developing new products based on silicon photonics technology with major customers Broadcom and Nvidia, and will enter mass production as soon as 2025.
Taiwan
SEMI International Semiconductor Industry Association announced at the SEMICON Taiwan 2024 International Semiconductor Exhibition Silicon Photonics International Forum on September 3, 2024 that under the guidance of the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
On the SEMI platform, TSMC and Japan Optoelectronics called on the Industrial Research Institute, Boruowei, More than 30 companies, including Shangquan, Hon Hai, MediaTek, Quanta, Fanquan and Xinyun, have jointly participated in building the most complete silicon photonics cluster ecosystem in Taiwan – SEMI Silicon Photonics Industry Alliance to create the next generation of key technologies .
Mainland China
China regards it as a breakthrough weapon in semiconductor development, and Israel also lists it as one of the important projects for its national science and technology development. Investment in the silicon photonics industry cannot be underestimated.
Because silicon photonic wafer manufacturing can use the already mature CMOS process and equipment of semiconductors, and the mainstream process falls between 45 and 90 nanometers, this is very important to the Chinese semiconductor industry, which is good at IC design but has relatively backward processes.
On the contrary, it is regarded as the best shortcut to promote the internal circulation strategy of regional semiconductors. Take Huawei, which is engaged in mergers and acquisitions around the world, as an example. Its acquisition targets include CIP Technologies, a British integrated photonics research center, and Caliopa, a Belgian silicon photonics technology developer. The Chinese government has even established the East Lake High-tech Zone Optoelectronics Park in Wuhan to fully develop silicon photonics-related technologies.
Packaging technology
Silicon photonics advanced packaging technology
The current mainstream silicon photonic advanced packaging technologies include the following:
- Vertical Integration Packaging (VerticalIntegrationPackaging)
- Co-PackagedOptics (CPO)
- Fiber Attach Packaging
- Waveguide-Based Packaging
- Glass substrate packaging (GlassSubstratePackaging)
CPO
Among them, CPO technology is an area of packaging technology that global chip manufacturers focus on. This is a highly integrated method of co-packaging optical and electronic components in the same package. This helps reduce the distance between optics and electronics, improving the energy efficiency and performance of data center interconnects. Industry analysts said that as chip giants such as TSMC, Intel, Nvidia, and Broadcom have successively developed silicon photonic chips and the crucial co-packaged optics (CPO) technology, it is expected that the CPO market will explode as soon as 2024. increase.
After 20 years of laying out related technologies, Moonlight, a major packaging and testing company, has officially launched CPO packaging technology and successfully entered Broadcom’s silicon photonics product supply chain.
Silicon photonics packaging market
A research report published by Sphericalinsights, a well-known research institution, shows that the global co-packaged optics market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 68.9% from 2022 to 2032. The global co-packaged optics market is expected to reach US$2.84 billion by 2032. The agency calculated The market in 2022 will be only 150
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