Silicon Photonic Chip Market Will Exceed US$600 Million In 2028

Market research organization Yole Intelligence stated that silicon photonics technology has made great progress since 1985, from the initial development of highly constrained waveguides to the strategic adoption of materials, integration and packaging technologies in the CMOS industry, ultimately establishing its position in optical modules. dominance in the field.

Yole concluded that the main and most direct application scenario of silicon light is the data center, and Intel occupies a dominant position in this field. In addition, there are broad development prospects in the field of telecommunications, optical lidar, quantum computing, optical computing, and in the medical care field.

Yole pointed out that the silicon photonic chip market will be worth US$68 million in 2022 and is expected to exceed US$600 million by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of 44% from 2022 to 2028. The main factor driving this growth is 800G pluggable optical modules for high-speed data center interconnect and machine learning that require higher throughput and lower latency.

The silicon photonics industry landscape is shaping up around different players. Currently actively involved in the silicon photonics industry include: vertically integrated players (Intel, Cisco, Marvell, Broadcom, Nvidia, IBM, etc.), start-ups/design companies (AyarLabs, OpenLight, Lightmatter, Lightelligence, etc.), research institutions (University of California, Berkeley) Campus, Columbia University, Stanford Engineering School, MIT, etc.), wafer foundries (GlobalFoundries, Tower Semiconductor, imec, TSMC, etc.) and equipment suppliers (Applied Materials, ASML, Aixtron, etc.).

The silicon photonics industry is characterized by ongoing research and development, strategic partnerships, and collaboration between different players to advance the technology. Thanks to the emergence of silicon photonics foundries and growing expertise in the field, the technology is also becoming more accessible to more companies. At the same time, this technology can increase data transmission speed, reduce energy consumption and realize various applications, so it is an industrial field with great development prospects.

Intel leads the data communications market with 61% market share, followed by Cisco, Broadcom and other smaller companies. In the telecommunications field, Cisco (Acacia) accounts for nearly 50% of the market share, followed by Lumentum (Neophotonics) and Marvel (Inphi). Coherent pluggable ZR/ZR+ modules promote the development of the telecommunications silicon photonics market. Chinese companies are in the prototype or sample stage.

Despite silicon's shortcomings as a light emitter, recent breakthroughs have introduced innovative methods of fabricating active optical components on silicon, enabling mass production in just a few years.

Notably, silicon has a relatively low internal quantum efficiency (QE), while direct bandgap III-V materials have efficiencies approaching 100%. Essentially, the focus is on direct bandgap semiconductors, and the path to silicon photonics appears to be monolithic integration via quantum dot lasers (QDs).

Traditional InP PIC requires five to six regeneration steps, which results in high cost, many problems, and limited output. Heterogeneous integration has the advantage of combining multiple materials, bonding, and processing simultaneously. However, since the size of III-V substrates is much less than 300 mm, the cost of the substrates is not low, which has prompted growing interest in monolithic integration. Therefore, monolithic integration technology of on-chip lasers offers a promising approach to achieve high-density and large-scale silicon photonics integration.

The inherent parameters of QD lasers exceed those of quantum well (QW) devices, with longer service life, high tolerance for material defects, epitaxial integration of QD lasers on silicon, high temperature stability, and uncooled operation , and enable narrow linewidth lasers to increase bandwidth.

Silicon photonics is not limited to a single substrate or material. Various material platforms for photonic integration, such as thin film LiNbO3 (TFLN), SiN, BTO, GaAs, etc., have shown their potential. Among them, silicon-based thin-film TFLNs are progressing rapidly. TFLNs have strict mode restrictions and have proven to be very valuable for creating high-speed modulators.

In addition, there is a big gap in scale between silicon photonics integration and silicon integrated circuits. Silicon integrated circuits have been reduced to a few nm. Silicon photonic chips do not require 3nm photolithography technology. 45nm technology is fully sufficient to produce high performance and high quality. of silicon photonic chips. This is advantageous because using a foundry with lower lithography levels is very cost-effective.

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