Article from Semiconductor Engineering (full article here: semiengineering.com ) Interesting read, once again consistent with what we've come to understand from Suresh and Co. about where the industry is headed and the impact POET can have with their OI platform.

July 12, 2021

Chipmakers Getting Serious About Integrated Photonics

a few key paragraphs:

Integrating photonics into semiconductors is gaining traction, particularly in heterogeneous multi-die packages, as chipmakers search for new ways to overcome power limitations and deal with increasing volumes of data.

Photonics offers a potential solution. In fact, it could provide a step-function improvement, opening the door to new applications that today are limited by fixed power budgets and copper interconnects.

This now takes what was an expensive piece of the system — the interposer — and uses it to create a step change in the communications between the heterogeneous pieces. “The photonic layer should be the interposer and provide the communication layer, both between chiplets and to the outside world,” says Pond.

Conclusion

The need for chiplets has caused the industry to address certain problems. They were also problems for integrated optics, but that market was too small to make a difference. As we near solutions for 3D ICs, some of the barriers for integrated optics have been removed.

But that is only the first part of the story. With those problems solved, optics can change the way we think about communications within the package and move from an electrical interconnect interposer to an optical interposer. What was seen as an expensive overhead now becomes a faster and lower-power solution that was not been possible before. When those two technologies come together, new system-level solutions become possible. Power will drop considerably, and total product cost may decline eventually.