Data Communication Market: Technology Iteration And Upgrading, 800G And Other High-speed Modules Will Become Mainstream in The Future

According to the latest data of LightCounting, the sales of Ethernet optical modules will reach 4.6 billion dollars in 2021, up 25% year on year. In the future, with the continuous development of AI, Metauniverse and other new technologies, and the long-term growth of network traffic, the sales of Ethernet optical modules will also maintain a rapid growth and continue to be upgraded iteratively. According to Omdia's prediction, with the continuous improvement of bandwidth demand in the next few years, although the 100, 200, and 400 Gbit/s optical modules will still retain the largest market share, the 800 Gbit/s optical modules will be commercially available in 2023 and scale deployed in 2025.

3. New technologies are increasingly improved and the industry is vigorously upgraded

Industry upgrading trend: relevant technology market sinks

Data center optical interconnection scheme can choose two support technologies according to its transmission distance, one is direct detection technology, the other is coherent detection technology. With the advantages of high capacity and high signal-to-noise ratio, coherent detection is widely used in long-distance DCI interconnection in MAN, while the application scenario of direct detection is more suitable for relatively short distance interconnection. At first, the coherent optical module was applicable to backbone networks with transmission distance greater than 1000km, and then gradually sank to metropolitan area networks with transmission distance of 100km to 1000km, edge access networks with transmission distance less than 100km, and data center interconnection fields (DCI) with transmission distance of 80km to 120km. In the field of data communication, coherent technology has become the mainstream scheme of data center interconnection.

Industrial upgrading trend: superior performance of silicon optical solution

Optoelectronics for communications are accelerating from separation devices to integration. Traditional communication optical devices are mainly developed based on III-V semiconductor materials. In recent years, they face challenges in size, cost, power consumption and "integration with electronic chips". Silicon based optoelectronic integration technology (referred to as "silicon optical technology") is an important direction of photonic integration. It is based on silicon materials, and uses the mature CMOS process in large-scale integrated circuit technology for optical device manufacturing. It has the advantages of low cost, low power consumption, small size and "integration with integrated circuit technology".

The concept of silicon based optical chip was first proposed in the early 1990s. At the beginning of its birth, it was mainly aimed at replacing electrical interconnection with optical interconnection within the chip. However, due to the limitations of process and design, this technology did not receive enough attention and input in a long period of time in the early stage. It was not until 2004 that Intel developed the first 1Gb/s silicon light modulator that people saw the possibility of "light in and copper out" of silicon chips. Later, with the joint promotion of IBM, Cornell University, Bell Laboratories, MIT and other units, the working speed of silicon optical chips reached 50Gb/s around 2013, surpassing the mainstream optoelectronic devices at that time for the first time.

Industrial upgrading trend: breakthrough in silicon light development is expected

Although the overall advantages of the silicon optical module scheme are not obvious in view of yield and loss, the low-cost advantages of the silicon optical module may make it a mainstream product for upgrading the data center network to 400G in ultra 400G short distance scenes and coherent light scenes.

According to the forecast of Zhongji Xuchuang quoting Lightcounting, the global silicon optical module market will reach nearly 8 billion US dollars in 2026, which is expected to account for half of the market share and share the market equally with traditional pluggable optical modules. From 2021 to 2026, the overall cumulative scale of silicon optical modules will approach 30 billion dollars.

Industrial upgrading trend: optoelectronic co packaging technology helps upgrade high-speed modules

Photoelectric co packaging (CPO) refers to the collaborative packaging of switched ASIC chips and silicon optical engines (optical devices) on the same high-speed motherboard, thereby reducing signal attenuation, system power consumption, cost and high integration. According to Zhongji Xuchuang citing Lightcounting, the biggest application scenario of CPO technology may not be in the exchange ASIC field, but in the CPU, GPU and TPU markets in HPC and AI cluster fields. By 2026, HPC and AI clusters are expected to become the largest market for CPO optical devices. CPO shipments are expected to start from 800G and 1.6T ports, and will be commercially available from 2024 to 2025. CPO shipments will start from 2026 to 2027, and will be mainly used in the data communication short-range scenarios of super large cloud service providers. Pluggable devices will continue to dominate the market in the next five years or more, and in 2027, CPO ports will account for nearly 30% of the total 800G and 1.6T ports.

Industrial upgrading trend: thin film lithium niobate modulator is expected to grow

Although bulk lithium niobate modulator has played a key role in transmission modulation of high-speed backbone network for decades, it has encountered bottlenecks in key parameters for further improvement of transmission rate, and its volume is large, which is not conducive to integration. New generation thin film lithium niobate modulator chip technology Through the latest micro nano process, the thin film lithium niobate modulator prepared has the advantages of high performance, low cost, small size, batch production, and CMOS process compatibility, which is a highly competitive solution for future high-speed optical interconnection.