The markets for photonic integrated circuits in 2030

What will be the leading markets for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) by the decade's end? And what are the challenges facing the PIC industry?

SiLC Technologies' Lidar PIC. Source: SiLC Technologies.

A panel session at the recent PIC Summit Europe event held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, looked at what would be the markets for photonic integrated circuits by 2030.

The market for PICs is dominated by datacom and telecom. However, emerging applications include medical and wearable devices, optical computing, autonomous vehicles, and sensing applications for the oil, gas, water, and agriculture industries.

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ECOC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Here are the first contributions from Huawei's Maxim Kuschnerov, Coherent's Vipul Bhatt, and Broadcom's Rajiv Pancholy.

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Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

At ECOC, my main interest concerned the evolution of data centre networking to 400 gigabits per lane for optics and electronics. Historically, the adoption of new optical line rates always preceded the serdes electrical interconnects but now copper cables are likely to drive much of the leading development work at 400 gigabit per lane.

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OFC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent OFC show in San Diego. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are the first responses from Huawei, Drut Technologies and Aloe Semiconductor.

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

Some ten years ago datacom took the helm of the optical transceiver market from legacy telecom operators to command a much larger volume of short-reach optics and extend its vision into dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM).

At OFC, the industry witnessed another passing-of-the-torch moment as Nvidia took over the dominant position in the optics market where AI compute is driving optical communication. The old guard of Google is now following while others are closely watching.

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ECOC 2023 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent ECOC show in Glasgow. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are the first responses from BT, Huawei, and Teramount. 

Andrew Lord, Senior Manager, Optical Networks and Quantum Research at BT

I was hugely privileged to be the Technical Co-Chair of ECOC in Glasgow, Scotland and have been working on the event for over a year. The overriding impression was that the industry is fully functioning again, post-covid, with a bumper crop of submitted papers and a full exhibition. Chairing the conference left little time to indulge in content. I will need to do my regular ECOC using the playback option. But specific themes struck me as interesting.

There were solid sessions and papers around free space optics, including satellite. The activities here are more intense than we would typically see at ECOC. This reflects a growing interest and the specific expertise within the Scottish research community. Similarly, more quantum-related papers demonstrated how quantum is integrating into the mainstream optical industry.

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Data centre photonics - an ECOC report

• ECOC 2022 included talks on optical switching and co-packaged optics.
• Speakers discussed optical switching trends and Google's revelation that it has been using optical circuit switching in its data centres.
• Nvidia discussed its latest chips, how they are used to build high-performance computing systems, and why optical input-output will play a critical role.

Co-packaged optics and optical switching within the data centre were prominent topics at the recent ECOC 2022 conference and exhibition in Basel, Switzerland.

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ECOC 2022 Reflections - Part 1

Gazettabyte is asking industry and academic figures for their thoughts after attending ECOC 2022, held in Basel, Switzerland. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned, and what, if anything, surprised them.

In Part 1, Infinera's David Welch, Cignal AI's Scott Wilkinson, University of Cambridge's Professor Seb Savory, and Huawei's Maxim Kuschnerov share their thoughts.

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Huawei sets transmission record with new modulator

Coherent discourse: Part 1

A paper from Huawei and Sun Yat-Sen University in the January issue of the Optica journal describes a thin-film lithium niobate modulator. The modulator enabled a world-record coherent optical transmission, sending nearly 2 terabits of data over a single wavelength.

Maxim Kuschnerov

Much of the industry’s focus in recent years has been to fit coherent optical technology within a pluggable module.

Such pluggables allow 400-gigabit coherent interfaces to be added to IP routers and switches, serving the needs of the data centre operators and telecom operators.

But research labs of the leading optical transport vendors continue to advance high-end coherent systems beyond 800-gigabit-per-wavelength transmissions.

Optical transport systems from Ciena, Infinera and Huawei can send 800-gigabit wavelengths using a symbol rate of 96-100 gigabaud (GBd).

Acacia Communications, part of Cisco, detailed late last year the first 1.2-terabit single-wavelength coherent pluggable transceiver that will operate at 140GBd, twice the symbol rate of 400-gigabit modules such as 400ZR. 

Now Huawei has demonstrated in the lab a thin-film lithium niobate modulator that supports a symbol rate of 220GBd and beyond.

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