Intel's silicon sees the light

Yesterday’s announcement by Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara of an electrically pumped, hybrid laser adds another key component to silicon’s growing toolbox that could make the technology the platform of choice for integrated photonics.

The research work combines the light-emitting properties of Indium Phosphide (InP) - used for telecom and datacom lasers - with the economies of scale and ease of processing of silicon wafers. Bonding the silicon and InP wafers together combines the two materials, with the InP providing the light trigger to cause lasing in the silicon optical wave guide. This promises cheaper wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) lasers, and arrays of lasers.

Complete optical systems-on-chip become possible by combining the laser with other optical building blocks developed in silicon, such as 1 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s modulators, wavelength multiplexers and photo-detectors. Intel expects the technology to reach the market in five to ten years’ time. Target applications are those that already use high-speed electrical interfaces such as rack-to-rack and chip-to-chip communications.

One particular application is high-end servers, that will increasingly use multi-core microprocessors packed densely on line cards. Such confined computing will need the terabit/s data rates and lower power consumption optical interfaces deliver. Thus the first application of the technology will likely be within large data centres.

But Intel does not rule out the laser being used for existing optical telecom applications, from fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) to ultra long haul dense WDM. Indeed, Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab, believes cheaper optical transceivers for FTTH could result from the technology.

"We believe this success bodes well for rapid progress in active silicon optics though commercial application is years away," says Karen Liu, Ovum-RHK's vice president, communication components.

For more details regarding the Intel-UCSB announcement, click here