PHOTONICS WEST 2023

Speaker: Manish Mehta - Broadcom Copper I/O is approaching a limit as data rates continue to move to higher speeds and more complex modulation. As the line rate increases for high-speed systems from 50G to 100G to 200G, losses through a standard system increase from under 10dB of loss to over 20dB of loss. As you reach 200G/lane, the board level complexity increases to where almost all board traces have a length that will exceed the loss budget to achieve even 1m DAC cable transmission out of the box. So how do you overcome this? Well, there are definitely great investments in technologies such as flyover cables and Active DACs. And these will generate meaningful adoption. But if you truly plan to scale, the right way to overcome this scale problem is to drive optical directly from the ASIC package.

Speaker: Vipul Bhatt - Coherent While co-packaged optics presents an opportunity to reduce power consumption, it also faces several technical and business challenges. From a transceiver implementer’s perspective, the two form factors – CPO and pluggable – are competing choices available to the customers, and therefore, must play by the same rules of success in the transceiver market. We will describe this balance and conclude with an opinion on what it will take for CPO to compete successfully in the market.

Speaker: James Kim - Sundiode (United States) We present the ongoing development of micro-LED micro-displays having vertically stacked multi-junction micro-LED pixels for application in AR/MR devices. Specifically, the micro-displays utilize RGB micro-LED subpixels that are stacked vertically in a single pixel, yet fully independently controlled, and thus allows full-color emission from essentially the entire area of the pixel. Stacking RGB subpixels in a single pixel eliminates the need for pixel-transfer processing entirely and reduces the pixel footprint to make single-panel, full-color micro-displays with high pixel density suitable for AR/MR devices, and offer improved color gamut from point-like RGB pixels. In addition, the Stacked-RGB micro-LED pixel design encompasses a novel concept in a CMOS drive scheme which significantly enhances the utilization of the small pixel area of a micro-display.

Speaker: Matthew Hartensveld - Innovation Semiconductor, Inc. (United States) Innovation Semiconductor's technology supports improved micro-LED display resolution, efficiency, and scalability. In place of mass transfer or other proprietary processes, Innovation uses a monolithic material system allowing fabrication of complete micro-LED displays on one wafer using only common process steps available in commercial foundries. Innovation has also developed novel color tunable micro-LEDs that emit light from 640 to 425 nm and can act as single LED pixels. Sizes from 500 µm to 2 µm have been demonstrated and maintain performance.

Speaker: Gerald Dahlmann - Coherent Semiconductor diode lasers have become ubiquitous in consumer electronics devices. Many advanced mobile phones and tablets contain lasers for various sensor functions, such as proxiity, autofocus, biometric and 3D scanning sensors. New use cases for lasers have recently emerged in augmented and virtual reality headsets, as well as in wearable devices. These applications are creating new challenges and driving the industy to develop lasers with higher efficiency, more compact form factors and expanding the spectrum of wavelengths. The paper will give an overview of the status of the industry and emerging trends. It will discuss laser technology platforms from the near-infrared to the mid-infrared range, and edge emitter as well as VCSEL diode architetures.

Speaker: Dr. Mark J. Furlong, IQE Plc, GaAs has been the mainstay of many recent developments in consumer product sensing, enabling new functionality in facial recognition and camera imaging to achieved, providing a much needed feature boost for mobile devices where technology innovation has been stagnating. But sensing is evolving to support future consumer electronics platforms with applications requiring devices which can detect and emit light at longer wavelengths, this enabling a raft of new technologies to be developed in healthcare, wearables and autonomous driving platforms as well as higher performance proximity sensing.