At OFC 2019, Founder and Chief Technology Officer Benny P. Mikkelsen discusses electro-photonic integration in one of three plenary talks. Photonic integration and digital signal processing (DSP) are critical technologies to support the ever-increasing need for higher data rates and smaller, cost effective optical interfaces for cloud, access and transport applications.
DSP technology offers a step-size increase in data rates by enabling advanced transmission techniques, while compensating for impairments at higher baud rates. Whereas DSP ASICs are riding Moore’s law supporting higher density and lower power consumption on a rather predictable time scale, photonic integration provides cost and size reduction by integrating ever-more optical functions. As we move to higher data rates, co-packaging of photonics and electronics – beginning with analog ASICs, then DSP ASICs, and ultimately switch ASICs – could offer additional improvements in power, density and performance.
In this talk, we provide an update and outlook of the challenges and opportunities the industry is facing as we scale to higher data rates and smaller form factor optical interfaces.