Unlocking The Potential Of Silicon Photonics For High-Speed Data Center Interconnects

By Emily Newton

Many research teams and commercial companies are developing silicon photonics applications. Some of their work involves silicon photonics in data centers. What is silicon photonics, and how could it affect current and future high-speed data center interconnects?

What Is Silicon Photonics?

People who work with silicon photonics use silicon as an optical medium, integrating light-based components onto tiny chips. Numerous silicon photonics applications involve data center interconnects (DCI) because such solutions can handle terabit-scale traffic while saving energy and supporting cost-effective operations.

What is silicon photonics’ future, especially in the context of data center interconnects? Groups are working hard to answer that question and find the most feasible ways to apply the technology. Their findings will be important for increasing the use of silicon photonics in data centers.

How Will Silicon Photonics Applications Support Data Centers?

Numerous groups are investigating new silicon photonics applications and determining the most feasible ways to make them maximally effective. This work will create opportunities to install silicon photonics in data centers. Here are some recent fascinating examples.

Preparing For A Data-Dependent Future

What is silicon photonics’ role in solving the bandwidth bottlenecks limiting many data centers? One research team hopes their work could create hundreds of light wavelengths for data transfers with only one laser. The group prioritized miniaturization, putting all optical components onto chips consisting of a few millimeters.

They also created a novel photonic circuit architecture that could transfer exponentially more information without using more energy. It enables individual data encoding for each channel and reduces interference with neighboring channels. The researchers believe their approach will improve energy efficiency through a compact solution that reduces the distance over which electrical data signals propagate.

With more industry leaders deciding to adopt cloud-first strategies, data centers will remain in demand and necessary for technological advancements. However, progress — including the innovations made by this team — will be critical for creating the high-speed data center interconnects the world needs now and will require to an even greater extent soon.

Learning More About Photonic Properties And Associated Materials

Numerous industries rely on specialty gases. Argon-helium mixtures are instrumental in achieving high-quality welds in manufacturing plants. Specialty gases also support accurate medical diagnoses and preserve freshness in food processing facilities.

In 2022, researchers created a photon-based gas that could unlock opportunities for new sensors. That same year, another team created new polymer materials ideal for fabricating photonic modules. What is silicon photonics’ potential within and beyond the data center in the context of this work? This team’s achievements could minimize obstacles when producing optical interconnects.

The new polymer materials enable people to use a low-cost and high-throughput lithography system to directly print a single-mode optical interconnect into a dry film material. The researchers also mentioned that this approach works with the manufacturing techniques deployed to produce chip-based photonic components. That could make it easier to implement and scale.

Addressing The Intensive Energy Usage

Virtually all technological options have some prominent pros and cons. What is silicon photonics’ weakness? The chips require significant power to maintain high performance and a moderate temperature. That’s an understandable barrier to using silicon photonics in data centers, especially since these facilities are already extremely energy-intensive.

A 2024 report from the International Energy Agency found that global data centers consumed 460 terawatt-hours of energy in 2022. However, that amount could reach 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026. People have made various progress in reducing energy consumption, but achieving sustained gains is challenging because of the usage associated with emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

However, in 2023, a team paved the way for improved silicon photonics applications. They built photonic chip prototypes for which temperature control happens via gate voltage and requires almost no electric current. Tests indicated this approach could reduce by a factor of more than 1 million the energy needed for chips’ temperature control.

The researchers said their achievement could one day enable data centers to operate faster and more powerfully but with less energy consumption, despite the demands of applications such as ChatGPT.

When Will Silicon Photonics In Data Centers Become Mainstream?

These examples highlight how people are making many significant findings to support using more silicon photonics applications for high-speed data center interconnects. In addition to these research-based efforts, some vendors have released photonics-based data center hardware. However, the market remains small. Silicon photonics products should become more widespread as more research occurs and people determine what works best.

These advancements will be particularly valuable as people’s lives increasingly depend on the internet and high-tech applications that rely on data centers. These facilities are firmly a part of modern society but must continually improve to remain relevant to the world’s changing needs. Silicon photonics products can create the necessary progress and address many shortcomings associated with current data center operations and hardware.

However, since many leaders resist doing things differently and using new products, some will need proof of silicon photonics’ advantages when applied to data centers. Seeing that evidence will help convince them it’s time to embrace the advancements.

About The Author

Emily Newton is the Editor-in-Chief of Revolutionized. She regularly explores the impact technology has on the industrial sector.