News: Optoelectronics
20 November 2024
Tower starts producing 1.6Tbps transceivers on latest silicon photonics platform
Specialty analog foundry Tower Semiconductor Ltd of Migdal Haemek, Israel has begun volume production of 1.6Tbps silicon photonic products for multiple lead customers based on its latest silicon photonics (SiPho) platform. The firm’s latest platform includes innovations that have helped to double data rates relative to its existing 800Gpbs high-volume products. These innovations have been developed in close collaboration with several tier-1 customers that have designed breakthrough 1.6Tbps products on this enhanced platform and have now begun to order production quantities.
The process supports data rates of 200Gbps per lane, of which eight are built in parallel to achieve the total 1.6Tbps transceiver throughput. This is in contrast to the 100Gbps-per-lane data rates of existing high-volume silicon photonic technology as used in existing high-volume 800Gbps products.
“We have recently announced 1.6Tbps optical transceivers based on silicon photonics technology in addition to ramping up our SiPho-based 8x100G transceivers,” says Dr Jack Xu, VP of transceiver engineering at Coherent Corp. “Tower can help innovate and bring to market advanced technology and also has the experience to ramp silicon photonic products to high volume, thereby benefiting our mutual customers.”
Tower says that its high-volume silicon photonics platform delivers all of the key enabling features required for high-data-rate optical transceivers including high-bandwidth optical modulators and low-loss edge coupling from lasers, and to optical fibers. These features play a vital role in the development of high-speed datacom components and support the industry shift from 100Gbs per lane to 200Gbs per lane and beyond.
