Scintil Photonics has unveiled a prototype III-V-augmented silicon photonic integrated circuit (IC) at OFC 2022.
This is a single-chip solution comprising all the active and passive components made from standard silicon photonics available in commercial foundries, with III-V optical amplifiers/lasers integrated on the backside of advanced silicon photonic circuits.
Scintil’s solution is designed to boost communications in data centres, high-performance computing (HPC), and 5G networks, prime users of optical transceivers. The 1,600Gb/s prototype IC integrates state-of-the-art silicon modulators and germanium photodetectors supporting 56 GBaud PAM 4, with integrated III-V-optical amplifiers. It offers the capability of delivering sustainable bit rates through parallelization and the increase of Baud rates at a competitive cost-per-gigabit-per-second.
The IC leverages wafer-scale bonding of III-V materials on silicon for integrating optical amplifiers/lasers.
It is aimed that the IC will help to solve industry challenges including dramatically reducing the number of components and active alignments, resulting in better cost-efficiencies; addressing both the pluggable transceiver market and co-packaged/near-packaged optics requirements for bringing the optical chip close to high-performance processing units (XPU) in data centre environments. The new IC is on display at booth 5227