Photonics has seen solid growth yet it hasn’t met its potential for explosive growth. 2020 won’t be the year that happens, but photonics will pass several milestones on its way to broad commercialization.
Though maturing, today’s photonics ecosystem still most closely resembles the electronics ecosystem of the1980s. Whereas electronics evolved over the past >half century to become today’s sophisticated, well-oiled design and manufacturing ecosystem, this evolution has not yet occurred in photonics.
Photonics is becoming relevant, then prevalent, and finally dominant at shorter and shorter distances. Long haul telecommunications are transported via fiber optics. Now photonics has moved into the data center. Hyperscale data centers are challenged by heat, bandwidth, power consumption and cost, and data latency. Compared to copper, fiber is cheaper, faster, lower latency, higher bandwidth, and consumes less power, thus lowering heat and costs.
Fiber optics deployment between racks in the data center is largely complete, and fiber now interconnects servers within the rack. So photonics has already moved from dominance at kilometers, to prevalence at ten of meters, to relevance at single meters. As Photonic Integrated Circuits (PIC) become more commonly available, photonics will become relevant at millimeters. Work is underway to integrate photonics, including the laser, on-chip with electronics, moving photonics relevance down to microns.
