Intel, in the journal Nature Photonics, has claimed world record performance in optical communications using silicon photonics.

The major utilization of the Silicon photonics-based photo dectors is to send and receive optical information, particularly in very high-bandwidth applications like supercomputers. “Silicon photonics is essential for ultra-fast transfer of data (in) future computers powered by many processor cores,” reported Intel.

Since the development is based on silicon--a readily available, low-cost material used in semicondutor chips today--and outperforms more exotic, pricier materials, it is extremely vital and significant. It should be noted here that till date, Silicon photonics technology has suffered from performance shortcomings, as it has been using complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) techniques.

Mario Paniccia, an Intel Fellow and director of the company's Photonics Technology Lab, said, “This research result is another example of how silicon can be used to create very high-performing optical devices. The development can be used not only in optical communications but areas such as sensing, imaging, quantum cryptography, and biological applications.”

In order to achieve a gain-bandwidth product of 340 GHz, a silicon-based Avalanche Photodiode (APD) was created by a team led by Intel researchers. “This is the best result ever measured for this key APD performance metric and allows lower-cost optical links running at data rates of 40Gbps or higher,” claims Intel.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) jointly funded the research and manufacturing and process development was provided by Numonyx, a flash memory chipmaker.