Intel photonics engineers have unveiled a chip, made entirely from silicon, that can transfer data at speeds up to 200Gbps, on a single beam of light. This prototype chip is twice as fast as current optical modules, but these are not made from silicon and suffer from limitations Intel has been able to work around with this new silicon chip. Just the fact the chip is made from silicon makes it much easier to scale up the speed for future uses.
The reason silicon hasn’t been used with the other optical circuits is because silicon as a semiconductor doesn’t really have the properties that you want. Instead, companies have used compounds such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The properties of these materials, compared to silicon, are superior, but they are limited by the manufacturing and the hardships of making them scale to faster speeds.
The secrets are hidden within the silver-colored box in the middle. There’s where the eight modulators are hidden.
This is partly why optical research took a step back and decided to give silicon another try, and not surprisingly, Intel has been a leading contributor to this research. If there is anything Intel should know, it’s the properties of silicon, and obviously it does. A recent paper describes how Intel engineers have been able to split a beam of light into eight separate beams, or channels if you will, where each sub-beam would be encoded by a modulator capable of transforming up to 25Gbps of data into light. The eight sub-streams are then merged into one main stream again.
They haven’t been able to test it with all eight modules at once though, but only one at a time. There were concerns that when all eight modulators would be active that they would cross talk, interact and hinder performance to some extent. They will however test this in the near future and publish the results in an upcoming paper.
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