Silicon Photonics Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast to 2022

Silicon photonics, an optical communications system is a new and evolving technology where data is transferred between computer chips by optical rays for future computing systems. Optical rays can transfer more data than electrical conductors in much less time. Lasers are used in silicon photonics to transfer data into light (photon) pulses. These light (photon) pulses are then combined by a multiplexer into a single signal and then transferred through an optic fiber to a silicon receiver where a demultiplexers brakes the signal back to into separate channels, then a photodetectors turns the light back into data. Silicon photonics thus, allows data volumes to be moved fast between computer chips in large data-centers, super computers and servers via pulses of light. Silicon photonics enables high degree of integration of different products such as modulators, optical waveguides and photo-detectors.

Silicon photonics consumes less energy than electrical conductors and data is transmitted much faster around 100 Gigabytes per second. On the other end silicon photonics is being developed for long distance optical transmission for telecom industry which will increase data transmission speed. Silicon photonics eliminates the drawbacks of electrical conductors such as, high power consumption, slow transmission speed, delicate designing and bulky components. Silicon photonics has also found their way in consumer PC’s, PC accessories and HDTV’s.

The major drawback of using silicon photonics is high development cost. The manufacturing and developing cost of silicon based photonics is comparatively higher the conventional conductors. Silicon photonics companies must have to create their own CAE/CAD programs to incorporate silicon photonics integration. This acts as the only drawback of using silicon photonics integrated system.

The silicon photonics market can be segmented on the basis of end user application and by product types. The various types of silicon photonics includes: silicon photonics waveguide, silicon optical modulators, silicon optical interconnect, wavelength division multiplexer filters and silicon led among others. Silicon photonics has its applications in many industries such as, data communications, telecommunications, medical, aerospace and robotics.

North America and Europe is the fastest growing market of silicon photonics accompanied with Asia Pacific. Africa and Middle East has a slower growth as developing silicon photonics incorporates high cost and high R&D.
The major players in this industry are Intel Corporation, IBM, Hamamatsu Photonics k.k, Finisar Corp., Oclaro Inc., Mellanox Technologies, Das Photonics, Infinera Corporation