This 1.6Tb/s silicon photonic chip adopts the semiconductor technology to integrated optical couplers, splitters, modulators, and 4x16 AWG optical multiplexer into a 5mm x 5mm area. Thanks to the support of Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute (TSRI), this novel 1.6Tb/s silicon photonics chip is designed at the end of 2018 and send to IMEC to produce. After getting the chip at the beginning of 2020, those separate devices of optical edge coupler, optical splitter, optical modulator, and 4x16 AWG optical multiplexer have been measured and verified. The overall chip performance has also been checked by injecting lasers and the light signal has been coupled by singlemode fiber to demonstrate the feasibility of this novel silicon photonics chip.

Many famous cloud service provider, such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft invest a lot of resource to build hyperscale data center. The servers inside these hyperscale data centers might over 100,000, and the high speed interconnection and low power consumption is major concerns. Therefore an optical transceiver with higher transmission speed is very critical. According to our proposal at 2018, a 1.6Tb/s silicon photonic chip has been built and demonstrated. This is an essential breakthrough of the data transmission bottleneck inside data center. To our best knowledge, this silicon photonic chip has the most power data transmission capability of 1.6Tb/s in such a small chip area of 5mm x 5mm.

This silicon photonics chip enable a huge data transmission capability of 1.6Tb/s and can be applied inside the data center. Through the development of this chip, we have built a proprietary structure and a full set of component data base to construct the chip. This is a very important technology in the future applications of cloud and 5G networks. In the meantime, these IP and component data base based on silicon photonics technology can be applied and to develop new chips in the field of optical sensing, biological signal detection, vehicle control to create new business possibility and chance.