Scintil’s Augmented Silicon Photonic IC is a single-chip solution comprising all the active and passive components made from standard silicon photonics available in commercial foundries, with III-V optical amplifiers/lasers integrated on the backside of advanced silicon photonic circuits.
Scintil’s solution will boost communications in data centers, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and 5G networks, prime users of optical transceivers. The optical transceiver market is expected to reach US$20.9 billion in 2026, at a CAGR of 14% for 2021 – 2026.
“We are very pleased to announce our prototype IC at OFC this year,” said Sylvie Menezo, president and CEO of Scintil Photonics. “The close collaboration with our commercial foundry was key to achieving this fabrication milestone, resulting in unprecedented levels of integration and performance. Scintil is already working with three leading edge customers; it is fundamental to them that we can prototype and produce in commercial high-volume silicon foundries, using multi-customer standard processes.”
Technical features and key benefits
The 1,600 Gbit/sec prototype IC integrates state-of-the-art silicon modulators and germanium photodetectors supporting 56 GBaud PAM 4, with integrated III-V-optical amplifiers. This disruptive IC technology offers the capability of delivering sustainable bit rates through parallelization and the increase of Baudrates at a competitive cost per gigabit per second.
The IC leverages wafer-scale bonding of III-V materials on silicon for integrating optical amplifiers/lasers.
The benefits in solving some key industry challenges include:
- Dramatically reducing the number of components and active alignments, resulting in better cost-efficiencies
- Addressing both the pluggable transceiver market and co-packaged/near-packaged optics requirements for bringing the optical chip close to high-performance processing units (XPU) in data center environments
- Intrinsic hermeticity removing the need for hermetic packages
