Guangtongxin yanjiu (Dec 2023)
Technological Progress of Information Optoelectronics Microelectronization and Discussion on Its Development
Abstract
Microelectronics technology has enabled electronic devices from discrete to integrated, bringing exponential improvements in cost, reliability, power consumption, volume and other aspects for decades, which is the key to the wide application of electronic information technology. Currently, electronic information technology is facing bottlenecks such as bandwidth and energy consumption, and Moore’s Law is struggling. As another major carrier of information, photons have characteristics such as high bandwidth, high speed, low power consumption, and high parallelism. The continued progress of information technology must rely more on photons. However, the cost, reliability, and scale productivity of photonic devices lag behind the electronic devices. Therefore, based on the historical experience of the development of electronic devices, we propose the " microelectronization" of optoelectronics, emphasizing that optoelectronics take " integration" as the development track and " photoelectric fusion" as the development direction.Taking integration as the development track is to emphasize that optoelectronics should learn from microelectronics in order to meet the requirements of modern information systems for devices. The integrated development of optoelectronics has three main characteristics: the chip platform basing on silicon; the steady increase in integration scale; and the evolution of production mode towards fabless.Taking photoelectric integration as the development direction, it emphasizes the necessity of the combination of optoelectronics and microelectronics, and jointly solve the challenges of bandwidth, rate, power consumption and other challenges currently faced by information technology through device integration and function integration of the two, so as to meet the requirements of digital twins, metaverse and other applications. Photoelectronic fusion mainly has two levels: chip and system, involving monolithic optoelectronic integration, Co Packaged Optics (CPO), hybrid optoelectronic integration, device disaggregation, photoelectric hybrid computing, etc.The " microelectronization" of optoelectronics is not only a technological development guide, but also will have a significant impact on the information optoelectronics industry. The article have conducted open-minded thinking from the perspectives of market, competition, enterprises, products, etc., and pointed out that it may lead to industry reshaping.The " microelectronization" of the development of information optoelectronics is an objective requirement for the continued advancement of information technology. On the one hand, photons are being generalized from transmission technology to ubiquitous connection technology in the entire Information Communications Technology (ICT) domain, from the ground to the ocean and space at the macroscale, and from the shelf and board to the package, and chip at the microscale. On the other hand, photons will be generalized from bandwidth providing technology to a basic hardware technology for the entire ICT domain, from transmission and connection to complex functional domains such as computation, processing, and routing. The " microelectronization" of optoelectronics will enable photons not only have the potential but also the ability to fully utilize their advantages to support the continued progress of the information technology.
