Silicon Photonics: Fueling the Next Information Revolution

by Daryl Inniss, Roy Rubenstein

Silicon photonics uses chip-making techniques to fabricate photonic circuits. The emerging technology is coming to market at a time of momentous change. The need of the Internet content providers to keep scaling their data centers is becoming increasing challenging, the chip industry is facing a future without Moore’s law, while telcos must contend with a looming capacity crunch due to continual traffic growth.

Each of these developments is significant in its own right. Collectively, they require new thinking in the design of chips, optical components, and systems. Such change also signals new business opportunities and disruption.

Notwithstanding challenges, silicon photonics’ emergence is timely because it is the future of several industries. For the optical industry, the technology will allow designs to be tackled in new ways. For the chip industry, silicon photonics will become the way of scaling post-Moore’s law. New system architectures enabled by silicon photonics will improve large-scale computing and optical communications.

Silicon Fueling the Next Information Revolution outlines the history and status of silicon photonics. The book discusses the trends driving the datacom and telecom industries, the main but not the only markets for silicon photonics. In particular, developments in optical transport and the data center are discussed as are the challenges. The book details the many roles silicon photonics will play, from wide area networks down to the chip level. Silicon photonics is set to change the optical components and chip industries; this book explains how.

Captures the latest research assessing silicon photonics development and prospects Demonstrates how silicon photonics addresses the challenges of managing bandwidth over distance and within systems Explores potential applications of SiP, including servers, datacenters, and Internet of Things

207 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 5, 2016

Reviews

[MKmuses · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up at the library and finished reading it over the weekend. I learned about new components that are essential to silicon photonics design, such as the Mach-Zehnder modulator, the High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT), and the Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifier (EDFA), and much more. This book is a good introduction and starter book, and the authors have clearly stated the target audience of the book. In my opinion, the authors could have added one more chapter on the difference between how ordinary silicon CPUs work and how photonic crisps work and the performance superiority over conventional semiconductor architectures, and then one or two more chapters on emerging manufacturers or existing components from optics or photoelectronics manufacturers that offer components for this field to point budding photonics engineers in the right direction.

Chapter 4 includes some examples of optical networking products, but the introduction of some SLED and EDFA component vendors could give engineers working on next-generation optical coherence tomography (OCT) or fibre-optic gyroscopes (FOG) some ideas for component-level designs. Another chapter would have been great: Existing MCU/CPU design methodologies use design tools like Cadence or PCB-level system design with tools like Altium, but what about photonics design? What types of tools are available or in development? Of course, this book is a precursor to much further reading.

[Paul Tenorio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good primer on this topic