s the data center network topology continues to upgrade and evolve, optical interconnection solutions for data centers are moving toward higher speed, lower power consumption, and lower cost. In the future, data centers will become more and more complex, which will inevitably lead to technological innovation. Silicon optical technology is one of the innovation directions in the data center scenario. With its material characteristics and inherent advantages of CMOS technology, it can well meet the requirements of data center for high speed, low cost, low power consumption and so on. In this article, ETU-Link will introduce the application of silicon optical integration technology in optical modules and its advantages.

At present, silicon optical technology is applied in the first generation of 4x25G products, such as 100G PSM4 and 100G CWDM4, 500-2km scenario; In the second-generation 1x100G product, it is mainly used in DR1/FR1 and LR1 500-10 km scenarios. In 200G products, the advantages of silicon-optical integration are not obvious; In 400G products,400G DR4/DR4+ products are in the sample/commercial stage. Silicon optical integration technology is mainly focused on the application scenarios of short and medium distance transmission within 2km.

Many experts point out that silicon optical technology will fundamentally change the industry of optical devices and modules in the future. Silicon optical technology has the advantages of low cost, low power consumption, high speed and high integration, and has great space for development. The silicon optical module integrates the optical chip and the electrical chip into the silicon optical chip to manufacture the optical modules as a chip, thus effectively reducing the material cost, chip cost, and packaging cost.

Although silicon optical technology has various advantages, the silicon optical integrated technology is also faced with many difficulties in the process of development, mainly reflected in the diversity of technical routes, different silicon optical chip schemes, different module design schemes of various manufacturers; Non-standard design suite, separation of design and Fab, lack of standard design and simulation tools, and PDK suite; Wafer automatic testing and cutting, customized silicon optical chips, manufacturers need to have wafer testing and automatic cutting ability.

Silicon optical technology has been considered to solve the bottleneck of power consumption, speed and volume in information network due to its outstanding advantages of low power consumption, high speed, compact structure, relatively low cost and easy large-scale integration since it was proposed.