Integrated photonics gets its moment – now Europe must catch on

A long time in the making, integrated photonics has reached an inflection point. Following this year’s announcements involving silicon photonics and co-packaged optics made by AI leader Nvidia and its manufacturing partner TSMC, the technology is gearing up for the next step. On 4 and 5 November, the industry convened at the fourth annual PIC Summit in Eindhoven to discuss, among other things, how to rapidly scale the technology to meet the demands of AI.

Traditional electrical interconnects struggle to keep up with the exploding data movement requirements within data centers. Silicon photonics (SiPh) offers a compact, energy-efficient solution for high-speed data transmission. Co-packaged optics (CPO) takes this a step further by moving the optical-to-electronic data conversion as close as possible to the GPU/ASIC switch, boosting bandwidth and reducing the power consumption.