What It Is
Silicon photonics and optical I/O use light to move data across shorter distances that have historically been electrical. The aim is higher bandwidth and better energy per bit between chiplets, packages, racks and data-center fabrics.
Why It Matters
Electrical I/O is becoming a bottleneck as accelerator clusters grow. Optical links, photonic chiplets and silicon photonics platforms are being developed to keep scale-out AI and networking systems fed with data.
What to Watch
Follow co-packaged optics, optical I/O chiplets, and foundry or research silicon-photonics platforms as they move from demonstrations into system designs.
