Session 1: Overview Presentations

The opening session presents perspectives from the public and private sector as a guide to the discussions throughout the rest of the day.

Where Do We Go From Here?
Glenn Wellbrock, Director of Optical Transport Planning, Verizon
100G is mainstream, next generation CDC-F ROADMs are becoming available and SDN is starting to take shape in the transport world.  The single biggest issue facing telecom / datacom at this point is driving down cost and the only practical way to get there is photonic integration.  The goal of this presentation will be to debunk capacity / scalability concerns and highlight the fundamental issues of cost, space and power that are causing the most grief to carriers. 

Photonics at DARPA: Past, Present, and Future
Dr. Josh Conway, Program Manager, DARPA
Abstract not available.
 

Session 2: Experience of Deployment

This panel will focus on deployment experience of integrated photonics in commercial fielded products, and the experience accumulated so far on these products.

Development and Deployment of Large-Scale Photonic Integrated Circuits
Scott DeMars, Director, Product Engineering and Reliability,  Infinera; Vikrant Lal, Director, Adv. Product Development, Infinera
In this presentation, we will share Infinera’s PIC integration product development activities and provide a comprehensive review of field reliability of 100 Gb/s large scale photonic integrated circuits.

Coherent Communications: A Sweet Spot for Silicon Photonics
Chris Doerr, Director of Integrated Photonics, Acacia Communications
With CMOS's ability to deliver powerful and low-power digital signal processing, coherent communications is becoming attractive in more and more communications applications. Besides the digital ASIC, coherent requires complex analog optics.  Silicon photonics is proving to be highly adept at reducing the cost and footprint of these optics.

Advanced Silicon Photonics Transceiver Integrated Circuits
Peter De Dobblelaere, VP Engineering, Luxtera, Inc.
We will address the key aspects of our silicon photonics technology platform including: process technology, device library, design environment as well as our light sources approach and integration with electronics. This will be followed by some examples of monolithic and hybrid transceiver designs. We will conclude by highlighting future scaling and integration roadmaps.

Highly Integrated 100G Coherent Transmitters and Receivers
Andreas Umbach, Vice President and General Manager, Finisar Germany
100G coherent systems require highly complex optical components for the transmission and reception of phase and polarization modulated optical signals. Monolithic and hybrid integration approaches are used to build cost-effective compact coherent receivers and transmitters.
 

Session 3: New and Noteworthy Developments in Productization

Speakers will offer perspectives on new integrated photonics products, and the process and shared challenges of productization.

Low Priced Photonics for Next Generation Data  Centers
Dan Maynard, Business Development Manager, IBM Microelectronics Specialty Foundry
The expected market demand for silicon photonics is expected to explode in the second half of this decade.  The increasing scale of datacenters is driving the need for longer reaches, which seems ideally aligned; however, the depth of silicon photonics market penetration will depend upon the price. Integrated photonics that leverages traditional semiconductor infrastructure will dominate the largest volumes.  This new thinking can also be applied to FTTx applications where today these are commonly found to be manually assemblies of discrete components.  This presentation will touch upon a few of the most important aspects that we can expect to see in the winning solutions.

Productization of Si Photonics for Networking/Communications
Kal Shastri, Distinguished Engineer, Cisco
Si Photonics based products for Networking/Communications applications – meeting IEEE standards and Cisco quality/reliability – are being shipped for more than a year. The quality/reliability data will be presented. Continuing to leverage IC industry eco systems for next generation products with a higher level of integration, lower power/cost and developments in that area will also be presented.

Optical Transceivers Using Heterogeneous Integration on Silicon
Eric Hall, VP of Business Development, Aurrion
Datacenters are creating an unprecedented challenge for optical transceivers requiring multiple high performance lasers, modulators and photodiodes in a single module to meet the bandwidth needs but with dramatically lower power and cost to reflect the higher volume and density of interconnections. The heterogeneous integration of InP material into a silicon photonics wafer flow enables high performance photonic components to be fabricated into photonic integrated circuits using established silicon foundry infrastructure for both fabrication and packaging. Aurrion has established a library of photonic circuit elements which can be combined to form the single chip solutions for products like 100Gb/s transceivers needed for datacenter applications.

Silicon Photonics for Bandwidth, Volume, and Cost Scalability
Arlon Martin, Senior Director, Sales and Marketing, Mellanox Technologies
In this talk we will review recent developments in commercialization of Silicon Photonics and how this technology can provide a bandwidth, volume and cost scalable interconnectivity solution enabling the future growth in Data Center and HPC applications.
 

Session 4: Alternative Approaches

This session offers an opportunity to hear about alternative approaches to integrated photonics such as hybrid integration, and also featuring the effort of the PETRA project in Japan.

Advantages of Hybrid Integration
Karen Liu, VP of Marketing, Kaiam Corp.
Optical communications rests on a large number of technology platforms. This is messy, and more seriously, fragments the investment required for both manufacturing and innovation. Silicon or InP monolithic integration seeks to converge as much as possible onto a single platform. The tradeoff is typically short-term compromise in device performance in favor of long-term advantages in platform capability. But the current state of affairs exists for good reason. Is optics intrinsically hybrid? Optical datacom and telecom components markets are challenged by rapidly changing and diverse market needs.  Innovative hybrid integration allows vendors to respond quickly and with lower incremental investment due to use of existing components.

Development of Silicon Optical Interposers in Japan
Takahiro Nakamura, Chief Manager, PETRA
We will discuss current state of the art development of silicon optical interposers with low power consumption. The research is executed at PETRA and universities in the framework of a big METI/NEDO program. The discussion will include silicon demonstration of optical interposers with high bandwidth-density of 30 Tbps/cm2 as well as athermal optical interposers integrating quantum dot lasers. A new optical engine “optical IO-core”, which is developed at PETRA, will also be presented.

Skorpios’ Silicon Photonics Platform
Alfredo Viglienzoni, SVP Sales, Marketing and Business Development, Skorpios Technologies
Skorpios will discuss its proprietary process that monolithically integrates III-V material into SOI wafers. Butt-coupled III-V and SOI waveguides are co-fabricated in a wafer-scale CMOS process, and they are naturally aligned by CMOS lithography. SiO2 hermetically seals the fabricated Silicon photonic chips including the III-V material during the CMOS process, which simplifies the packaging and reduces the cost. WDM devices made with the thick SOI thickness are insensitive to typical material and manufacturing errors as well as polarization, enabling tuning-free WDM operation. These devices, which are natively hermetically sealed, can be assembled directly on a card, changing the module making supply chain.