EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2020 — Lumerical

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.

As Ethernet data transmission speed continues its migration from 100G to 200G in 2020, photonics becomes more attractive in the transceivers required at either end of the optical fiber. The build-out for 100G is largely complete. In 2020 the transition to 200G is well underway, with early adopters moving onto 400G. At 400G, electronics will lose more of its grip in the transceiver market and photonics will begin its move from relevance to prevalence. At 800G and 1T (well past 2020), photonics will be in full dominance, with nary an electronics transceiver to be found.

In a new 2020 trend, the FANGs (Facebook, Amazon/Apple, Netflix, Google) will build photonic design teams focused on photonic transceivers tuned to their own specifications. Operating massive data centers, they will benefit tremendously by custom photonic designs crafted to their specific needs, just as the FANGs now design their own ICs.

Dominated by small niche commercial or R&D fabs such as SMART Photonics, LionX, LIGENTEC, imec, Leti, and AIM, today’s photonics foundries are generally geared toward R&D or providing MPWs. While solid foundries, advanced in their photonics offerings (such as Indium Phosphide for lasers), they do not possess the capacity for a large commercial market, and they have not yet developed the extreme customer support processes that semiconductor foundries have built over decades.

These foundries are taking notice of the increased photonic design activity at the FANGs and elsewhere and have or are contemplating entering the photonics business. Already TowerJazz and GlobalFoundries provide photonics services. 2020 will see other major semiconductor foundries enter the photonics business. The entry of these foundries will legitimize silicon photonics as a commercial business.

The first photonic PDKs emerged about two years ago, and they are starting to become prevalent,  targeting a variety of design tools. These PDKs tend to be primitive compared to semiconductor foundry libraries, but represent a significant and important step in maturing the commercial photonics ecosystem. As more PICs are manufactured and measured, sufficient data is becoming available for statistical analysis. 2020 will see the emergence of statistical-based PDKs, enabling Monte Carlo and corner statistical analysis. This will enable more robust designs, with a new focus on manufacturability, another requirement for the commercialization of photonics.

Established EDA vendors are taking note of the emerging photonic-electronic market. They are delivering design tools targeted to this market and forming key alliances with the leading Photonic Design Automation companies to provide a complete integrated design flow. Both Mentor and Cadence have integrated their design flow with the leading photonic simulation provider, Lumerical. For example, Cadence provides co simulation capabilities, enabling driving the entire design flow through the Virtuoso cockpit. Synopsys has pursued more of a go-it-alone strategy. In 2020, integrated Electronic-Photonic Design Automation (EPDA) flows, will become more sophisticated with the addition of statistical and design for manufacturing (DFM) capabilities.

In 2020 a few well-positioned companies will establish a photonic IP (PIP) business. Well managed companies with extreme photonic design capability and focus, and inexpensive access to design tools will spearhead the emergence of this market. Companies looking to deliver leading-edge photonic designs will engage these PIP providers to outsource their component design in order to focus their own resources on other value-added areas such as the overall PIC design. In its infancy, the PIP business will likely be similar to custom design services.

Breakthroughs in photonics design methodology, such as photonic inverse design (PID) will provide higher quality, more manufacturable designs and will lower the barrier so that photonic design no longer requires a PhD in physics. Better designs will push forward the applications that photonics can compete in and win at. More qualified designers more and more capable photonics design teams, resulting in greater competition leading to better products and faster evolution.

PID’s simplified, automated design methodology will replace today’s manual, iterative process, and will be applied to wide variety of photonic components in 2020. We are seeing improvements even on the best published designs, often now completed in just days. PID’s impact to photonics will be similar to the impact of logic synthesis to IC design in the 1980s. It will widen the circle of qualified photonics designers and shorten time to market. Just as logic synthesis unleashed a torrent of IC designer productivity, we will see similar productivity improvements of photonics designers.

Key applications for photonics will include transceivers, sensors (including in medical), LiDAR, AR/VR, and further out quantum computing.

Summary:

Photonics will see solid advancement in 2020. Growth rate will be impressive, with abundant applications. Growth will be paced by the evolution of the photonics ecosystem. Signs of maturity are becoming more prevalent as commercial foundries join the fray and design automation matures. 2020 is the year that the photonics commercialization comes into focus.

Tags: Predictions

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 15th, 2020 at 5:01 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.