FEATURED TECHNOLOGY: SPONSORED CONTENT
A TALE
PLATFORMS OF TWO
COULD INDIUM PHOSPHIDE PHOTONIC INTEGRATION BE KEY TO THE ONGOING DEVELOPMENT OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE COHERENT OPTICS? KEELY PORTWAY INVESTIGATES
T 12 FiBRE SYSTEMS n Issue 30 n Winter 2021
o address the undeniable growing demand for higher bandwidth, optical vendors have been playing their role with the development of various
coherent optical transceivers for different areas of the market, each with its own set of design considerations. Historically, the most used material platorm
for the photonic integrated circuits (PICs) behind these products has been indium phosphide (InP). However, the increase of silicon photonics in recent decades has promised to disrupt the optical components industry with a common platorm on which diverse optical functions can be integrated – in a way that scales easily to high volumes – while keeping manufacturing costs low. With new developments in this area, will this
ultimately start to make InP irrelevant? Not so, argues Paul Momtahan, director of solutions marketing at Infinera. ‘Tere’s been quite a bit of buzz about [silicon photonics] in the industry,’ he said. ’We have been asked “is this still a place for InP?” But, there are arguments for both
sides of the InP/silicon photonics debate. If you look at the coherent flow bubbles, it’s maybe not quite a 50/50 split, but there are vendors using InP, particularly if they have a background and assets and InP, and their vendors are using selective atomics. We believe there’s a very clear case for InP.’
Loss and gain Both technologies have their advantages. Silicon, for example, can provide low losses for its passive components to support manufacturing of very small photonic circuits. However, its physical properties prohibit
capabilities such as optical gain for laser or amplification functions. Tis means that silicon- based transceivers would require a separate, unintegrated InP-based laser and erbium- doped fibre amplifier (EDFA), while InP-based transceivers can be built as fully integrated PICs. Tis presents some obvious cost and
footprint benefits to using InP, which are punctuated by the use of waveguides, rather than coupling optics when it comes to
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