From May 16 to 17, the "2024 World Telecommunication and Information Society Day Conference" was held in Ningbo, Zhejiang. With the theme of "Digital Innovation Empowering New Industrialization", the conference discussed the important role played by industrial Internet, artificial intelligence, and optical communication technology in promoting new industrialization and developing new quality productivity.
At the opening ceremony, Yang Deren, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, delivered a keynote report entitled "Silicon-based optoelectronic luminescent materials and devices". He pointed out that with the advent of the "post-Moore era", silicon-based optoelectronics came into being, which has become one of the important directions of information technology development, attracting domestic and foreign industries to compete for layout. However, silicon-based optoelectronics is still facing technical bottlenecks, which require continuous innovation and breakthroughs in the industry.
01
Silicon-based optoelectronics came into being
As the foundation of the information and communication industry, integrated circuit technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, and the line width has been decreasing. However, due to the limitation of physical size, when the line width continues to drop to 3nm and 1nm, problems such as electrical interconnection signal delay, bandwidth limitation, and rising power density begin to appear, and the industry has entered the "post-Moore era".
How to develop integrated circuits in the "post-Moore era"? It is generally believed that there are two directions: one is more and more Moore, and the other is more than Moore. The former constantly reduces the line width; The latter takes the road of diversification and integration, integrating integrated circuits with optoelectronics, that is, silicon-based optoelectronics (silicon-based integration). Because of its obvious advantages in bandwidth, power consumption, electromagnetic interference, volume weight, interface density, etc., silicon-based optoelectronics has broad application prospects in communications, data centers, autonomous driving, sensing, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and other fields.
At present, the United States, Japan, Germany and other countries have invested heavily in the research of silicon-based optoelectronic technology, among which the United States has established the Photonic Integration Innovation Research Institute, and Intel has also invested heavily in it. From a global point of view, the silicon-based optoelectronics industry has been initially formed, and the industrial chain enterprises include domestic companies such as Huawei, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba. From the perspective of industrial progress, silicon-based photonics has been widely used in data center modules, ZR modules and long-distance coherent modules, Intel's 100G silicon photonics module shipments have reached 5 million, and the industry expects that by 2026, silicon photonics modules will occupy more than half of the optical module market.
02
The technical bottleneck needs to be broken
The silicon-based optoelectronics industry is booming and about to explode. However, Academician Yang Deren also timely reminded that as a new technology, silicon-based optoelectronics is still facing technical bottlenecks.
"Silicon-based optoelectronics includes a series of procedures such as light source, waveguide, modulation, detection, packaging, and integration, among which silicon-based light source is a major difficulty, and the problem has only been solved halfway now." Academician Yang Deren explained that silicon-based optoelectronics needs to emit laser on silicon-based materials on the one hand, and on the other hand, it needs to be compatible with integrated circuits in terms of process, but silicon is an indirect bandgap semiconductor with very low luminous efficiency, which has become a worldwide problem.
In order to solve the problem, the industry has tried a variety of technologies such as dislocation in silicon crystals, porous silicon photonics, silicon nano (quantum) dots, silicon-based rare earths, Raman lasers, hybrid lasers, and continuous-wave silicon-based InAs/GaAs quantum dot lasers, but the problems have not yet been solved, and they are still in the stage of multi-way exploration.
Among them, it is worth mentioning that Intel cooperated with UCSB to make laser-on-silicon with hybrid lasers, which has become the main solution for optical interconnection between silicon photonics wafers, and has entered the stage of commercial application. However, this scheme has problems such as large size, large passive waveguide loss, and difficult alignment, and can only be applied to inter-chip optical interconnection, but cannot be applied to on-chip optical interconnection.
Looking forward to the future, academician Yang Deren said that silicon-based optoelectronics is one of the important directions of information technology, and the interconnected light source between silicon substrates can be industrialized through bonding technology, but the optical interconnection on silicon chips is still a bottleneck. "The revolution has not yet succeeded, and comrades still need to work hard." Yang Deren appealed. He believes that through the joint efforts of colleagues in the industry, the problem of silicon-based optoelectronic light source can finally be truly solved.
END
Author: Shu Wenqiong
Editor-in-charge/layout: Wang Yurong
Reviewer: Wang Tao, Mei Yaxin
Producer: Liu Qicheng
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