News: Optoelectronics
8 March 2022
Scintil unveils III-V-augmented silicon photonic IC
Scintil Photonics of Grenoble, France and Toronto, Canada, a fabless developer of silicon photonic integrated circuits (integrated laser arrays, 800Gb/s transmitters and receivers, tunable transmitters and receivers), is unveiling a prototype III-V-augmented silicon photonic integrated circuit (IC) in booth #5227 at the Optical Fiber Communication conference & exhibition (OFC 2022) in San Diego, CA, USA (8–10 March).
The augmented silicon photonic IC is a single-chip solution comprising all the active and passive components made from standard silicon photonics available in commercial foundries, with III-V optical amplifiers/lasers integrated on the backside of advanced silicon photonic circuits.
Scintil says its solution can boost communications in data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), and 5G networks (prime users of optical transceivers). The optical transceiver market is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% from 2021 to $20.9bn in 2026.
“The close collaboration with our commercial foundry was key to achieving this fabrication milestone, resulting in unprecedented levels of integration and performance,” says president & CEO Sylvie Menezo. “Scintil is already working with three leading-edge customers; it is fundamental to them that we can prototype and produce in commercial high-volume silicon foundries, using multi-customer standard processes.”
Technical features and key benefits
The 1600Gb/s prototype IC integrates silicon modulators and germanium photodetectors supporting 56GBaud PAM 4, with integrated III-V-optical amplifiers. The IC technology offers the capability of delivering sustainable bit rates through parallelization and the increase of baud rates at a competitive cost per gigabit per second.
The IC leverages wafer-scale bonding of III-V materials on silicon for integrating optical amplifiers/lasers.
The benefits in solving some key industry challenges are said to include:
- dramatically reducing the number of components and active alignments, resulting in better cost-efficiencies;
- addressing both the pluggable transceiver market and co-packaged/near-packaged optics requirements for bringing the optical chip close to high-performance processing units (XPU) in data-center environments;
- intrinsic hermeticity removing the need for hermetic packages.
Menezo is participating as a speaker during the OFC symposium on ‘Emerging photonic interconnects and architectures for femtojoule per bit intra data center links networks’ on 8 March (2–6:30pm PST).
