Silicon photonics

So naturally I went to engineering school and it was 20 years ago.

And back then, Silicon Photonics was this niche upcoming branch in engineering.

with no prospect for any job at all, so I decided to jump on that ship.

I did my PhD in that field and then by that time I had the opportunity to move to San Diego to join a startup company there that was trying to commercialize silicon photonics, one of the first companies to do that.

and to successfully do that.

I moved back to IMEC, where I worked on laser integration for silicon photonics for a while.

And then five years ago, I joined NVIDIA, back then when I still had to explain to people what NVIDIA actually was.

And so we started from scratch, built the silicon photonics technology there into a product-ready maturity.

It's a small chip.

It's called silicon photonics chip.

It'll be the size of my fingernail.

And that small little chip will be able to transmit, receive, and steer light, and will be able to provide tens of gigabits, if not hundreds of gigabits per second eventually, and will become part of your access network.

But it's really evocative.

It sort of sums it up really neatly.

These silicon photonics chips, though, you are sort of seeing buy-in from the kind of, you know, the semiconductor community.

I mean, I'm not necessarily expecting you to name specific companies if you don't want to, but you would see an ecosystem there taking shape because people are starting to buy into the story that you're telling.

And on that EIC are hundreds of millions of transistors.

So, you know, don't think of, even though now the word photonics, silicon photonics, optics, but you should think of this as you know, photonics adding a new high-performing leading-edge advanced capability to leading-edge CMOS nodes and leading-edge advanced packages.

So the first thing to realize is that, you know, people in general kind of go, okay, I think leading-edge CMOS is hard.

I think advanced packaging is hard.

Because I can have the greatest technology in the world, but if you can't ramp true volume production, then it's not a solution for customers really trying to build high volume rack scale architecture and deploy them on time.

Because everyone's optimizing to, hey, what's my time to first token that generates revenue, right? So yeah, I think in the short term, we're going to live through a chaotic, turbulent set of technologies, form factors.

But I think in the longer term, we're going to land this new generation of silicon photonics into a TSMC-like foundry plus OSAT flow.

And companies like ours are focusing our efforts on building the highest performance chips in that environment.

So without further ado, we would like to unveil another technology called Today, it is photonics.

And in particular, we're going to be talking about silicon photonics.

But just stepping back, maybe the question is, what is photonics? Photonics is the study of using light to transmit information, using photons, massless particles of light, to send information from point A to point B.

And classically, you can do that in two ways.

That's, you know, multi-billion industry tipping, um, shipping products all the time and really, maybe a little quietly, but it's carrying a lot.

The industry that's being built is really carrying a lot of the information and the data that we use every day.

I'm pretty sure that as we go from where I am in California to where you are, it's being touched by products made by Silicon Photonics along the way.

When you were starting to work on it at HP Labs 20 years ago, what did you think of the potential promise of the technology? And today, what does it mean for the world?