
Datacom will be the main driver for Silicon Photonics

Despite the dashed hopes of using Si photonics for consumer applications in the short term, this technology is still very promising, especially for data centers.
By Eric Mounier, Ph.D., is Chief Analyst at Yole Intelligence, part of Yole Group
Over the past 50 years, mobile technology innovations have been rolled out each decade. Mobile bandwidth requirements have evolved from voice calls and texting to ultra-high-definition (UHD) video and a variety of augmented reality / virtual reality (AR / VR) applications. Despite the profound implications of the COVID-19 outbreak for the telecom infrastructure supply chain, consumers and business users worldwide continue to create new demand for networking and cloud services. Social networking, business meetings, UHD video streaming, e-commerce, and gaming applications will continue to drive growth.
The driving forces are mainly social media, digital entertainment, and cloud computing, which have voracious appetites for more bandwidth and faster interconnect speeds. This, in turn, affects the data center network architecture (disaggregation, AI and ML, strong focus on power consumption). All this will require new high-speed, low-latency technologies for data transfer (heterogeneous packaging, interposers, PICs,).