The first domestic 1.6Tb/s silicon optical chip has been developed successfully, which is a major breakthrough. This is the first leap of China's silicon optical chip technology to the Tb/s level and provides broadband interconnection in next-generation data center.
The first domestic 1.6Tb/s silicon optical chip has been developed successfully. The chip was jointly developed by the National Optoelectronics Innovation Center, the State Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Communication Technology, Accelink and Pengcheng Laboratory.
The 1.6Tb/s silicon optical chip aims to solve the problem of mutual restriction of data bandwidth and power consumption in network communication equipment. It improves data transmission's capacity and energy efficiency through photoelectric fusion and breaks through the key technology of the Tb/s silicon optical transceiver chip.
In terms of theoretical technology, the joint R&D team has systematically mastered the key technologies of photoelectric collaborative silicon optical modulator and heterogeneous germanium silicon waveguide detector, which has increased the bandwidth of silicon optical active devices to more than 80GHz.
Various silicon optical devices' manufacturing processes and compatibility problems have also been overcome. The R&D team developed high-frequency and high-density packaging and an advanced photonic link equalization method. This is the first time in the world to complete a single 8 x 200Gb/s silicon-based optical interconnection chip functional verification.
Compared with the existing commercial silicon optical chips, the channel rate and single chip interconnect capacity of the 1.6Tb/s silicon optical chip are increased by two times respectively, realizing the first leap to the Tb/s level of optical interconnect chips in China.
The 1.6Tb/s silicon optical chip has updated the previous best level of single optical interconnect rate and interconnect density in China, showing the outstanding advantages of silicon optical technology such as ultra-high speed, ultra-high density and high scalability. This provides a reliable optical chip solution for broadband interconnection in the next generation of data centers and strong support for the vigorous development of new technologies and industries such as supercomputing and artificial intelligence.