The recent article titled, “Silicon Photonics is Hot ” authored
by Rick Merritt and based on an interview with Andy
Bechtolsheim, spurred me to take a deeper look at the technology
challenges we’re facing with silicon photonics as we scale
switching networks from 10G to 100G and eventually one terabits.
It’s a brave new world when we eliminate the tried and true hand
assembly of hundreds of optical piece parts and move to silicon
photonics. Some optical functions are easy to implement in
silicon, while others are more difficult. We cannot, and should
not, mix some of the old parts with a silicon chip to create a
partial silicon photonics solution. Rather, we need the whole
Optical Engine to be integrated onto the silicon platform. The
Optical Engine takes multiple high-speed electrical channels,
converts them to optical, combines the channels to send them via
a single optical fiber to any distance from as close as the next
rack to as far as across the entire data center. At the receive
end, the Optical Engine