Intel's 300mm Heterogeneous Silicon Photonics Platform: A First Look at the Next-Generation Photonics Platform at OFC 2025

At OFC 2025, Intel presented the latest progress on its 300mm heterogeneous silicon photonics platform. From core component upgrades to an expanding range of applications, the talk showcased Intel's technical strength in high-speed links for data centers and AI. Here are the key takeaways.

---

🎯 Target Applications

Intel's silicon photonics platform focuses on three application areas:

1. Pluggable optical transceivers

   • More than 8 million modules shipped since 2016.

   • Hot-swappable, standardized designs make them the workhorse of data center optical links.

2. Co-Packaged Optics (CPO)

   • Compared with traditional pluggables, CPO offers lower power, higher port density and lower latency.

   • In 2021, Intel first demonstrated a complete optical engine co-packaged with an Ethernet switch.

3. Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI)

   • Delivers Tbps-class chip-to-chip optical interconnect to meet the high-speed needs of CPUs, GPUs and AI compute.

🧩 Gen 2 Platform: Another Leap in Performance

Intel's second-generation silicon photonics platform remains CMOS-based and delivers the following upgrades:

• 50% higher laser power (heterogeneous integration of III-V materials)

• 200G/lambda-class modulators (supporting traveling-wave and ring structures)

• A full passive component library (including low-loss waveguides, splitters and couplers)

🔬 Key Component Highlights

🔦 Lasers and Amplifiers (SOA)

• III-V materials heterogeneously integrated on Si.

• 13% wall-plug efficiency at 80°C.

• The SOA delivers >10 dB gain, 15 dBm saturation power and a <8 dB noise figure.

🌀 Modulators

• 16Ω traveling-wave modulator: >67 GHz bandwidth, supports DSP drive.

• 90Ω version: low power and high extinction ratio, suited to driverless architectures.

• Ring modulator: <1.45 V·cm phase efficiency, verified in 200G PAM4 testing.

🌉 Passive Components

• Waveguide loss: 0.2 dB/cm single-mode, 0.6 dB/cm multimode.

• MMI and crossing losses as low as 0.06 dB.

• Supports a range of couplers (low-NA, high-NA, V-groove), with a silicon nitride version in development.

🛠️ Design Tools and Automation

• A design platform built on Cadence, supporting:

  • Schematic capture

  • Layout conversion

  • Custom Pcells

• Automation across the full design flow, accelerating the path from design to manufacturing.

🧾 Conclusion: Toward More Integrated, Lower-Power Optical Interconnect for the AI Era

Intel's 300mm heterogeneous silicon photonics platform is now in its second generation, further improving laser power, modulation speed and component integration, and paving the way for high-speed optical links in data center and AI applications. As OCI and CPO architectures advance, highly integrated platforms like this will play a key role in next-generation computing architectures.