Enabling Silicon Photonics with Advanced Fabrication Solutions

2:45 pm - 3:10 pm

Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are already impacting our lives at an almost unbelievable pace. The addition of situational context to AI, and real time access to AI analysis through augmented reality and spatial computing, will only stand to further increase this impact. But, despite the incredible leaps in processing power that have enabled these advances in AI, memory and interconnect bandwidth have not scaled at the same rate. This leaves systems developers facing the need to overcome these performance barriers and in parallel deliver significant improvements in the energy efficiency of datacenters.

In this presentation we will focus specifically on silicon photonics and its role in helping to address these challenges. We will discuss how, even though such silicon photonics systems may be manufactured using 45nm or even 65nm CMOS design rules, some of the fabrication challenges associated with them are among the most demanding facing the semiconductor industry today. This will be highlighted by considering examples such as the fabrication of silicon and silicon nitride waveguides, optical fiber coupling technologies and next generation materials for modulators and photo detectors. We will also consider how silicon photonic ICs are integrated at the system level using advanced packaging technologies that enable solutions such as co-packaged optics.

Key Technologies Covered

Silicon photonics for high-bandwidth data transfer
AI infrastructure scaling challenges (memory & interconnect bottlenecks)
Energy-efficient datacenter architectures
Fabrication of silicon and silicon nitride waveguides
Optical fiber coupling technologies
Next-generation materials for optical modulators and photo detectors
CMOS-based photonics manufacturing (45nm/65nm nodes)
Advanced packaging for photonic-electronic integration
Co-packaged optics (CPO) for AI and high-performance computing systems
System-level integration of photonic ICs in AI-driven computing environments

Featured Speakers

Dr. David Haynes

VP Specialty Technologies, Lam Research

David gained a BEng and PhD in Materials Engineering from Swansea University.

David joined Lam Research in June 2016. He is currently Vice President of Specialty Technologies and Strategic Marketing in Lam’s Customer Support Business Group and is responsible for Lam’s strategy in Specialty Technologies.