In 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission and other four departments clearly proposed to lay out the construction of a national hub node of the national integrated computing power network, and accelerate the implementation of the "East and West" project.
Subsequently, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and other places responded to the call and successively launched the construction of national computing power network hub nodes.
In this regard, a number of industry research reports believe that the large-scale deployment of data centers with "East and West" will definitely detonate the optical communication industry, of which the optical chip and optical module industry will benefit first.
The iteration of optical communication is accelerated, and "old technology" ushered in new development
The upgrade of the technical route of the optical communication system depends on the innovation of technology. With the current optical communication system and modulation format becoming more and more complex, the optical communication chips and modules are evolving to a rate of 800bit/s, and will reach the Tbit/s level in the future. There is an urgent need to develop optical communication chips and modules with higher integration and lower cost.
At this time, a technology proposed as early as the last century reappeared in people's sight.
The development of silicon-based optoelectronic technology began in the 1980s. Soref discovered the plasmonic dispersion effect in crystalline silicon, which provided a theoretical basis for silicon-based electro-optic modulation.
The core concept of silicon photonics technology is "replacing electricity with light", that is, using laser beams instead of electronic signals for data transmission. Silicon photonics technology integrates optical devices and electronic components in silicon photonics modules into an independent microchip, which deeply integrates optical signal processing and electrical signal processing, and finally realizes "optical interconnection" in the true sense.
Silicon-based optoelectronic technology has the ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-fast rate and high anti-interference characteristics of light, as well as the advantages of microelectronics technology in large-scale integration, low energy consumption, low cost, etc., and is more suitable for high-speed and complex optical communication systems in the future. At the same time, it can meet long-distance data transmission and short-distance large-capacity data transmission between microelectronic chips. Through monolithic integration with microelectronic integrated circuits, high-speed and low-power on-chip interconnection can be realized, breaking through the data interaction between microelectronic processors. connected bottleneck.
At the end of last year, Alibaba DAMO Academy released the top ten technology trends for 2022, namely: AI for Science, co-evolution of large and small models, silicon photonics chips, green energy AI, flexible sensing robots, high-precision medical navigation, global privacy computing, satellite on-site computing, cloud-network integration, and XR Internet.
Among them, silicon photonics chips have sprung up, leading a revolution in the field of chips, integrating the advantages of photonics and electronics, breaking through the limitations of Moore's Law, and meeting the explosive computing power demand brought by artificial intelligence and cloud computing. It is expected that in the next three years, silicon photonics chips will carry high-speed information transmission in large data centers.
Optical chips leverage data center construction to become a new hot spot
The optical chip is the key core device in the optical communication system. As an optical chip using silicon photonics technology, silicon photonics chip is a new type of integrated circuit that manufactures silicon photonics materials and devices through characteristic processes. The advantages of silicon photonics integration mainly include low power consumption, high integration, reduced volume, and faster connection speeds by transmitting information through photonic media. At the same time, silicon photonics technology can be tested in batches through methods such as wafer testing, and the test efficiency is significantly improved.
Silicon-based optoelectronic technology has the advantage of high integration. But at the same time, high integration also puts forward higher requirements for chip packaging technology. The packaging of silicon-based optoelectronic chips requires high precision and is technically difficult. At this stage, the packaging cost of silicon-based optoelectronic chips even accounts for about 10 percent of the total cost of silicon-based optoelectronic modules. The development of low-cost, high-reliability silicon-based optoelectronic chip packaging technology is one of the challenges facing the large-scale industrialization of silicon-based optoelectronics.
The data center is an important market for the optical communication industry. It is the basic support facility for carrying digital computing power and information systems in various industries. It is also the key driving force for promoting industrial upgrading in all walks of life. Compared with ordinary optical modules, silicon optical modules have the advantages of low power consumption, high integration and high speed. For data centers that require a large number of optical modules, the most significant advantage of silicon optical modules is low cost.
If silicon photonics chips are widely deployed in the field of data centers, optical computing with silicon photonics as the core will likely drive the progress of neural networks, thereby affecting the development of the digital economy.