Intel's New Silicon Photonics Module For Data Centers Beams Info at 100Gbps Across 2km (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes:Intel has announced it's launching silicon photonics, a product 16 years in the making, to enhance the use of optics for data center traffic management. It has a tremendous advantage over other silicon solutions, Intel executive vice president Diane Bryant said at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Intel is "the first to light up silicon," she said, integrating the laser light-emitting material onto silicon. It uses silicon lithography to align the laser with precision, she said, creating a cost advantage because it's automatically aligned. It has a performance advantage because of the precision of lithography. The module Intel is introducing delivers 100 gigabits per second. With network traffic in the data center doubling every 12 months, electrons running over copper cable just won't cut it, Bryant said. However, the cost of fiber optics is growing, positioning silicon photonics as the next solution.The company adds that the silicon photonics module can deliver the data across two kilometers.

Comments

Is the cost of fiber optics really growing?

[bluefoxlucid]

Inflation doesn't mean growing cost. 20% inflation and an object going from $100 to $115 means the cost is shrinking.

There's all kinds of ways to make weird economic statements. You can ignore inflation and just point to raw dollars (i.e. $5 in 2016 is expensive; the thing cost $1 in 1938!). You can claim the cost of X is growing because the utilization is growing--we're running 50,000 meters of fiber optics instead of 500, so the cost of fiber optics now represents a bigger chunk of the data center's budget (100x more stuff, even if it costs 1/10 as much, is still 10x the cost).

Technology shifts how we do things. New technology means making a thing is cheaper; scarcity means your technology doesn't scale that high (more labor per unit to make that much that fast); and the deployment of a new technology to replace an old technology increases its market share, raising that technology's total marginal cost. I find it surprising that fiber optics would increase in cost per linear foot, considering fiber optics are relatively easy to produce in mass quantity and shouldn't have any scarcity issues.

Re:The cost of fiber optics is growing?

[xous]

I had no idea either until I looked it up.

Silicon photonics is the study and application of photonic systems which use silicon as an optical medium. The silicon is usually patterned with sub-micrometre precision, into microphotonic components.[4] These operate in the infrared, most commonly at the 1.55 micrometre wavelength used by most fiber optic telecommunication systems. The silicon typically lies on top of a layer of silica in what (by analogy with a similar construction in microelectronics) is known as silicon on insulator (SOI).

Re:The cost of fiber optics is growing?

[TechyImmigrant]

And? Won't this still require fiber optic connections between equipment?
This looks to be a new type of transponder not a new type of cable.

Fibre optic cables usually hook up to a fibre optic transceiver that has fancy lasers on it made on a different process to digital silicon chips, that then has to hook up to a comms chip, thus adding cost.

The silicon photonics just announced involves building a fibre optic transceiver on a silicon chip process so it can be integrated with the associated digital logic, eliminating unnecessary hardware and more closely coupling the data handling hardware with the fibre link.