Luxtera, a global provider of silicon photonics solutions, announced that it has partnered with TSMC for the manufacture of next generation silicon photonics solutions designed for future cloud, mobile infrastructure, enterprise and high-performance computing (HPC) platforms.
Under the agreement, Luxtera and TSMC are developing a new silicon photonics technology platform designed to provide more than double the optical link performance and four times the raw data throughput of competing silicon photonics solution on the market. The new silicon photonics platform will also enable full SoC integration of optical interconnect with the CMOS logic for applications such as network switch, storage or compute.
Luxtera stated that combined with TSMC silicon manufacturing capabilities and scale, its silicon photonic designs can enable optical interconnects that offer significantly higher performance at lower cost and power consumption to address the requirements of future data centres and 5G mobile networks.
Luxtera’s latest platform will be used in a suite of next generation silicon photonics solutions to deliver 100 Gbit/s per lane optical interconnects, starting with 100GBase-DR and 400GBase-DR4 transceivers in 2018, and subsequently expanding to include other standards-based solutions for 25, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800 Gbit/s and 1 Tbit/s optical interconnects.
In addition, complementing the new silicon photonics technologies, Luxtera will leverage TSMC’s 7 nm CMOS process to deliver high performance with low power across its product portfolio.
- In September 2016, Luxtera announced it had shipped more than one million silicon photonics PSM4 transceiver products designed for applications in cloud computing data centres. The Luxtera 100 Gbit/s PSM4 optical transceivers include four independent transmitter and receiver channels integrating phase modulators, photodetectors, waveguides, grating couplers, electrical re-timers and control circuitry, powered by a single integrated laser.
