Abstract
While many articles have touted Si photonics'
potential to bring the bandwidth and power-efficiency
benefits of photonics to mainstream semiconductor
applications, rigorous economic analysis has been
lacking. This paper leverages extensive data from the
major electronic and photonic semiconductor
manufacturers to model the competitiveness of two Si
photonic designs against InP-based alternatives for a
1310 nm, 100 gigabit ethernet LAN transceiver. Our
results suggest that silicon photonics may struggle
finding low-volume opportunities for early-stage market
adoption for the very reasons that silicon photonics is
attractive—the existing capital-intensive
infrastructure in Si-CMOS. Contrary to popular belief,
we demonstrate that InP platforms can, depending on the
yields achieved in each technology, have equal to or
lower production costs than silicon for all expected
production volumes. Silicon photonics does hold great
potential to be cost competitive in markets with annual
sales volumes above 900 000, including servers,
computing, and mobile devices.
© 2011 IEEE
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