Market and Technology Trends

Silicon Photonics 2023

By Yole Intelligence — Nov 2023

Beyond datacom generating most of the revenues for SiPh from hyperscalers, there are still investments for many other applications from leading semiconductor players like TSMC, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, GlobalFoundries...

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Vast array of potential silicon photonics applications hinting at promising opportunities on the horizon

Significant advancements in silicon photonics have occurred since 1985, progressing from the initial development of high-confinement waveguides to a technology that strategically incorporates materials, integration, and packaging techniques from the CMOS industry, ultimately establishing its dominance in the transceiver space.Silicon photonics offers a versatile platform for applications demanding high-volume scalability. Its primary and most immediate application lies in data centers, where Intel holds a dominant position. A second high-volume domain is telecommunications, exemplified by Acacia, which benefits from the superior performance of silicon processing. Optical LiDAR systems have much potential but face cost and 2D beam scanning challenges. 3D integration, housing both chips on the same silicon substrate, is vital for seamless control. Optical gyroscopes need sizeable chips for sensitive rotation sensors, benefiting from silicon substrates and SiN waveguides. Quantum computing is pivotal in the evolving AI and machine learning landscape. Optical computing, ideal for efficiency-focused tasks, garners industry attention and promises a substantial impact. Advanced photonic components and their integration for medical use can transform healthcare, enabling faster, more precise diagnostics, treatment, and patient monitoring, though overcoming regulatory and standardization challenges may be necessary for clinical adoption. Extending silicon photonics into the visible spectrum has possibilities for future developments, offering a wide range of innovative applications.The silicon photonics market was worth $68M in 2022 and is forecast to grow to more than $600M in 2028 at a 44% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR2022-2028). This growth will be driven mainly by 800G high-data-rate pluggable modules for increased fiber-optic network capacity. Additionally, projections of rapidly growing training dataset sizes show that data will need to use light for scaling ML models using optical I/O in ML servers.

Silicon photonics industry is confident of its future solutions and value

The silicon photonics industrial landscape is forming around diverse players - major vertically integrated players (Intel, Cisco, Marvell, Broadcom, Nvidia, IBM, etc.) actively engaged in the silicon photonics industry, startups/design houses (AyarLabs, OpenLight, Lightmatter, Lightelligence, etc.), research institutions (UCSB, Columbia University, Stanford Engineering, MIT, etc.), foundries (GlobalFoundries, Tower Semiconductor, imec, TSMC, etc.) and equipment suppliers (Applied Materials, ASML, Aixtron, etc.). All these players contribute to the significant growth and diversification.The silicon photonics industry is marked by ongoing research and development, strategic partnerships, and collaborations between various players to advance the technology. It is also becoming more accessible to a broader range of companies, thanks to silicon photonics foundries and growing expertise in the field. The technology's ability to improve data transfer speeds, reduce energy consumption, and enable various applications make it a promising area for industrial growth.Intel leads the datacom market with a 61% market share, followed by Cisco, Broadcom, and other smaller companies. In telecom, Cisco (Acacia) commands nearly 50% of the market, followed by Lumentum (Neophotonics) and Marvel (Inphi), with the telecom silicon photonics market driven by coherent pluggable ZR/ZR+ modules.Silicon photonics is an advanced technology requiring access to high manufacturing skills, which China lacks. Chinese companies are all at the prototyping or sampling level and rely on external partnerships to supply silicon photonics transceivers or optical engines in volume. Skorpios-Luxshare-Broadex and Sicoya-Broadex are good examples of collaborations in datacom. The Chinese telecom players Huawei and ZTE usually purchase PICs from Cisco or Nokia.

The pathway for silicon photonics appears to be monolithic integration through quantum dot lasers

Despite silicon's shortcomings as a light emitter, recent breakthroughs have introduced innovative approaches to creating active optical components on silicon and have achieved mass production in just a few years. It's worth noting that silicon's internal quantum efficiency is relatively low, whereas direct bandgap III–V materials boast an efficiency close to 100%.Essentially, we need to focus on direct bandgap semiconductors. The pathway for silicon photonics appears to be monolithic integration through quantum dot lasers (QD). Conventional InP PICs require five or six regrowth steps, which are expensive, problematic, and with limited yield. Heterogeneous integration offers the advantage of combining multiple materials, bonding, and processing simultaneously. However, the cost of the substrate is not insignificant, as III–V substrates are considerably smaller than 300 mm, prompting a growing interest in monolithic integration. Therefore, the monolithic integration techniques of on-chip lasers would offer a promising approach towards high-density and large-scale silicon photonic integration. QD lasers have demonstrated intrinsic parameters surpassing quantum well (QW) devices, providing a much longer lifetime, exhibiting large tolerance to material defects that allow for the epitaxial integration of QD lasers on Si, providing high-temperature stability leading to aan uncooled operation, and enabling narrow linewidth lasers to increase bandwidth. The realm of silicon photonics is not confined to a single substrate or material. Various material platforms for photonic integration, such as thin film LiNbO3 (TFLN), SiN, BTO, GaAs, and more, have demonstrated their potential. Among these, thin film TFLN on silicon has made rapid progress. TFLN, with its tight mode confinement, has proven invaluable for creating high-speed modulators.There is a significant disparity in scale when comparing silicon photonics with silicon integrated circuits, which have scaled down to several nanometers, while current silicon photonics technology operates at 45 nm. Remarkably, silicon photonics doesn't require 3 nm lithography. The 45 nm technology is perfectly adequate for producing high-performance, high-quality silicon photonic devices. This is advantageous because employing older foundries with lower lithography levels is very cost-effective.

Key features :

New revamped and extended market forecast in units, value, and wafers up to 2028
Market share of silicon photonics suppliers by volume and value for both datacom and telecom
Updated industrial landscape and supply chain
Applicative trends for the different markets
Updated technology trends of materials, laser integration, modulators, packaging, and testing.
Review the techniques to attach a laser to a silicon PIC

Report objectives :

To provide the context of why silicon photonics attract huge attention to optical interconnects and other applications
To understand the silicon photonics applications in DC network
Provide detailed market forecasts from 2018-2028 for datacom, telecom and sensing applications used in different market segments.
Provide market share analyses for datacom and telecom.
Review the supply chain for all applications.
Examine the application landscape and associated designs.
Review the trends toward higher speed and improved power efficiency:
- Review the new modulator technologies TFLN, BTO, organics, and graphene
Review the optical transceiver industry, with a focus on China.
Review the techniques to attach a laser to a silicon PIC
To identify the crucial challenges that must be solved to make giant strides in CMOS-foundry-compatible devices, circuits, integration, packaging and testing.

What's new?

New revamped and extended market forecast.
Review the new modulator technologies TFLN, BTO, Organics and Graphene
Review the techniques to attach a laser to a silicon PIC

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Silicon Photonics 2023

Beyond datacom generating most of the revenues for SiPh from hyperscalers, there are still investments for many other applications from leading semiconductor players like TSMC, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, GlobalFoundries...

Vast array of potential silicon photonics applications hinting at promising opportunities on the horizon

<img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="https://medias.yolegroup.com/uploads/2023/11/graph_silicon_nov2023-1.jpg" data-eio="l" />

Silicon photonics industry is confident of its future solutions and value

The pathway for silicon photonics appears to be monolithic integration through quantum dot lasers