Intel launches silicon photonics for datacenter traffic management

Intel announced on Tuesday that it has started shipping silicon photonic technology that has been in making for 16 years to enhance the use of optics for datacenter traffic management. The technology can move up to 100 Gbps over 2km or more of cable, creating a high-speed network that will eventually make copper wires obsolete, according to Intel.

Intel's silicon photonics, which the company first demonstrated in 2013 and touted as "a new era of optics", involves laser technology integrated onto silicon. Diane Bryant, executive vice president of Intel's Data Centre Group, explained during a keynote at Intel Developer Forum that the plan is to put optical communications at the chip level.

"Data centre traffic is five times the annual internet traffic, and this figure is doubling year on year. Electrons running over network cables won’t cut it. We see a future where silicon photonics optical input-output is everywhere in the data centre," she said.

The module Intel demonstrated is called the PSM4 silicon photonics model. It is basically silicon integrated with a laser light-emitting material. Using silicon lithography, the laser is aligned with precision. This is a huge advantage as there is no need for any manual designing and the laser automatically aligns as required. This not only helps cut down the cost of the material, but also increases the efficiency.

Intel's silicon photonics chip started shipping in June, and the firm named Microsoft as an early adopter of the technology for use in its Azure data centres.

Silicon photonics is available in two form factors: a "pluggable" model and an embedded one that can be mounted on the motherboard to provide high-speed optical links directly from the processor.