Jun 08, 2021 Silicon photonics overhyped? Nah!

Stephen Hardy 

May 28th, 2021

If you think you’ve already heard too much about silicon photonics, you won’t like the next five years, according to LightCounting. The market research firm states in the May 2021 edition of its Integrated Optical Devices report that use of the photonic integration approach is about to take off.

LightCounting notes that there was more smoke than fire when it came to the first several years of silicon photonics adoption. In fact, it took the technology more than a decade to find use in a quarter of the optical transceivers, active optical cables, and electro-optic modules whose shipments LightCounting tracks. However, adoption of the approach picked up significantly and now, particularly with the advent of co-packaged optics (CPO) as a new application, silicon photonics should be the basis of more than half of integrated optical devices shipped in 2026. Overall, products based on silicon photonics should account for almost $30 billion in sales between 2021 and 2026, with CPO representing about $0.8 billion of that total, the market research firm estimates.

“New higher speed products, new suppliers and foundries, as well as optics co-packaged with switching ASICs - suggest that we are at the inflection point for SiP adoption,” concluded LightCounting in a press release that announced the report.

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