Intel’s Silicon Photonics Project Is Almost Ready

Intel says its silicon photonics work, which promises to revolutionise data centres and mobile devices by combining optical signals with electronics a and integrate optical fibre into data centres, is close to fruition.

Silicon photonics embeds lasers into chips, and carries light signals in silicon waveguides, so optical fibre can replace copper wiring. Intel has been working on this field for 12 years and has  developed a standard for data centre rack connectors running at up to 1.6 Terabits per second. Now, mass market silicon photonic chips are on the way, Intel says.

“Because we print these, we have the high volume capability. It’s a new era of optics. When we put this [project] together, we can finally take it to the point when optics is everywhere – in a car, in a server, in a TV,” Jeff Demain, business development director for Silicon Photonics at Intel told a London briefing.

Speed of light

As data centres are growing, the distances over which the hardware needs to be connected are increasing, and copper cabling simply can’t support such expansive infrastructure. Copper cables are also heavy, decrease the density of the systems and block the space that could have been otherwise used for cooling, bringing down the efficiency of the whole server farm.

Silicon photonics was envisioned as a way to addresses the growth of data and the issues of cabling. It uses the traditional silicon manufacturing methods to make optical devices, cheap and at scale.

Intel has developed silicon chips which can send and receive data through optical fibre, faster and further than copper.  It then managed to put these chips on the motherboard using a simple, modular design, and even helped create the MXC cable and the connectors that will link them together.

The optical devices themselves are manufactured on silicon wafers, just like regular processors. They are tested automatically on wafer level – Intel says this alone reduces manufacturing costs by a third, in comparison with traditional fibre optic connectors.

The company wants to see silicon photonics used both inside the servers and between the servers, to replace a number of existing connections like PCIe and Ethernet. But that’s just the first step: in time, the technology could be applied to high performance computing, telecommunications infrastructure and eventually, even consumer electronics.

Since silicon photonics is moving steadily towards the market, Intel’s promotional efforts recently kicked into overdrive. In April 2013, the company demonstrated a system which transferred data at 100Gbps at IDF China. A month later, it announced a reference design for an MXC cable capable of 1.6 Tbps bandwidth.

About the same time, Intel also set a distance record, sending 25Gbps over 800 meters using Silicon Photonics and a single length of optical cable. And earlier this year, Huawei already presented a router board that uses Silicon Photonics.

The technology is likely to appear first as part of Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture, which aims to enable disaggregated hyperscale server racks that share components like power, cooling and networking.

The date of the actual launch is still unclear, and could be a few years away. However, Demain told TechWeek that it would be reasonable to expect a “big” announcement at IDF San Francisco in September.

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