May 14 2010
Research and Markets(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/963e9e/new_revenue_opport) has announced the addition of the "New Revenue Opportunities for Optical Interconnects: A Market and Technology Forecast" report to their offering.
The idea that boards and chips (or even devices on chips) could be interconnected with optics has excited the imagination of engineers for well over a decade. Start-ups have appeared with optical interconnection as their main focus only to disappear from the scene a year or so later. Established transceiver and semiconductor firms have also tried their hands at optical interconnection, but have generally abandoned or downsized projects after a short space of time.
Until very recently, optical interconnection has not portrayed itself as a good business to be in. Something has changed in the last year or so, however, and that is the size of the addressable market. Optical interconnection projects of the past have looked for initial revenues from the limited opportunities in supercomputers or in very high-end telecom gear. But, as Moore's Law has pushed VLSI ever forward, the addressable market for optical interconnects has expanded from a few niches to the giant market represented by corporate servers and large routers.
Many believe that within a few years processor speeds will reach a point where optical interconnects will be required in most standard business computers. Meanwhile, the recent introduction by Intel of its LightPeak technology has propelled optical interconnection from something that is little more than a topic for technical conferences to a potential, near-term revenue generator.
These encouraging signs are countered by the quite daunting challenges facing optical interconnection; primarily, that is, providing cost-effective optical technology in markets that are used to paying only minimal amounts for metal connectivity. There is also the issue of matching optical interconnect technologies to the fairly different needs of the chip-to-chip, board-to-board and on-rack interconnection. CIR expects proprietary solutions to these problems to create sustainable market advantages for firms in the emerging optical interconnection space.
There are also significant new business opportunities emerging for suppliers of optical interconnect technology, including firms with roots in the diode laser, active optical cabling, transceiver, and semiconductor industry. We also think that optical interconnection will be a key enabling technology for computer and telecom/datacom equipment firms, which will increasingly find that the speed of internal interconnection is limiting their success in deploying the latest processors.
With all this in mind, CIR is publishing this new report, which identifies where the opportunities are to be found in optical interconnection and quantifies how much those opportunities will be worth. We believe it will be invaluable reading for all firms for which optical interconnection is key to their business strategies.
Insights from the report:
While copper has had a stranglehold on both computing and networking equipment applications, moving forward, CIR believes that it will be unable to re-invent itself quickly enough to support all of the advances listed above. With each new generation of copper interconnects comes the need for more sophisticated digital signal processing, which becomes more costly in several ways dollars, power consumption and space. This is clearly not a direction in which either end users or OEMs want to move.
Optical integration is what CyOptics is doing in its Terapics project and Intel is trying with silicon photonics. However, optical integration still has a long way to go and there are many opportunities open with regard to chip design and materials used. CIR also sees considerable opportunity in the realm of quantum dot lasers. These are gradually becoming available and could enable chip-to-chip and on-chip optical interconnection. We could be on the cusp of transformation for board-to-board, chip-to-chip and on-chip with recent developments such as the Avago MicroPOD, Luxtera OptoPhy and Intel Light Peak as well as advances by QD Laser.
The volume opportunity for optical interconnects over the next five years will still be LC-to-LC jumpers in rack-based applications. There will also be healthy growth for MPO-to-LC and MPO-to-MPO assemblies.