News & Analysis
Slideshow: DesignCon presages silicon photonics era
Rick Merritt
1/31/2013 8:32 PM EST
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The DesignCon 2013 votes are in and the eyes have it. Copper
traces can handle 40 and even 56 Gbits/second, according to one of the
most talked-about papers at event here.Engineers from LSI Corp. and TE
Connectivity ran simulations showing eyes peeking open--barely--at 56G
without using any exotic technologies.
The paper did suggest in its assumption and conclusions (below) the industry will need to move to better materials (Panasonic's Megtron-6 got most mentions) and more advanced modulation schemes (here comes PAM-2 and -4!). But the big headline is there is at least one and maybe two more turns of the crank before printed circuit boards and chips enter the optical era.
It won't be easy. There's a Jell-O boat load of jitter ahead. But copper's here for a few more years.
Separately, IBM, Samtec and others showed important work in optical engineering plowing the way to a more distant future.
Meanwhile, the show floor displayed a handful of notable innovations, a few good engineers picked up awards for their work and people drank beer. The following slides provide a rough synopsis of the lessons learned and fun found along the way.
The paper did suggest in its assumption and conclusions (below) the industry will need to move to better materials (Panasonic's Megtron-6 got most mentions) and more advanced modulation schemes (here comes PAM-2 and -4!). But the big headline is there is at least one and maybe two more turns of the crank before printed circuit boards and chips enter the optical era.
It won't be easy. There's a Jell-O boat load of jitter ahead. But copper's here for a few more years.
Separately, IBM, Samtec and others showed important work in optical engineering plowing the way to a more distant future.
Meanwhile, the show floor displayed a handful of notable innovations, a few good engineers picked up awards for their work and people drank beer. The following slides provide a rough synopsis of the lessons learned and fun found along the way.
Next: Dances with robots
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iniewski
2/1/2013 12:05 PM EST
"here comes PAM-2 and -4!"...well, these schemes were used several years ago to get up to 1Gb/s so little has really changed in that respect, throughput numbers are "just" getting bigger
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Adele.Hars
2/1/2013 12:48 PM EST
Just fyi, silicon photonics is almost entirely an SOI-based area -- even for Intel.
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resistion
2/2/2013 10:38 AM EST
The photonic component, e.g., VCSEL, is also power-consuming. Putting it on silicon really defeats the purpose of the low-power designs for the other electronic components.
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yalanand
2/2/2013 11:51 AM EST
Its amazing to know that copper traces can handle 40-50GB/s. I remember in India all telephone lines were using copper cables and it was later replaced with optical cables. I wonder if it was good idea to retain those cables.
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iniewski
2/4/2013 1:17 PM EST
what is the power dissipation for VCSELs?
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