IST Lunch Bunch

The silicon chip has been the mainstay of the electronics industry for the last 40 years and has revolutionized the way the world operates. Today a silicon chip the size of a fingernail contains over one billion transistors and has the computing power that only a decade ago would take up an entire room of servers. Recently silicon photonics has attracted a great deal of attention since it offers an opportunity for low cost opto-electronic solutions for applications ranging from telecommunications down to chip-to-chip interconnects as well as possible applications in new emerging areas such as optical sensing and or bio-medical applications. <br><br>

Recent advances and research breakthroughs in silicon photonic device performance over the last few years have shown that silicon can be considered as a material onto which one can build future optical devices. While significant efforts are needed to improve device performance and to commercialize these technologies, progress is moving at a rapid rate. If successful, silicon may similarly come to impact optical communications as it has impacted the electronics industry. <br><br> This presentation will provide an overview of silicon photonics research at Intel Corporation, describe some of the recent advances including the recently announced demonstration of an integrated silicon photonics optical link operating at 50Gbps and the scalability of this technology to >1Tbps. In addition the presentation will provide an overview and discuss the potential applications and future opportunities for enabling photonics in and around the PC and server platform.