By adding photonics capability to world-leading silicon manufacturing, Intel® is developing a new class of high-speed optical connectivity products.
Intel® Silicon Photonics combines the manufacturing scale and capability of silicon with the power of light onto a single chip. We build silicon-based components that transmit and receive optical signals, moving vast amounts of information at 100 to 1600 Gigabits per second over long distances of up to several kilometers of fiber optic cables.
Today, our pluggable modules connect Ethernet switches in large data centers. As demand for bandwidth increases, silicon photonics co-packaged with switch ASICs will provide the band-width density necessary to scale future data center networks.
- New high-speed I/O connectivity based on photonics
- Intel® wafer-scale manufacturing with hybrid laser
- Platform for future high-density switch integration
What is Silicon Photonics?
Silicon Photonics is a combination of two of the most important inventions of the 20th century the silicon-integrated circuit and the semiconductor laser. With this combination, light has been integrated onto Intel's silicon platform, taking advantage of the bandwidth and reach of optical connectivity, using the scale and technology capability of silicon.
This new technology can reduce cost of ownership and improve the performance of future datacenter architectures by:
- Enabling high-bandwidth, software-configurable access to compute and storage
- Permitting software defined infrastructure (SDI) deployments to decouple hardware and software resources for disaggregated data centers
- Allowing optical connectivity that interoperates with other technologies, such as Ethernet switches,Smart-NICs, and FPGAs
