CMOS Photonics™ -: SOI learns a new trick

Luxtera has used Freescale Semiconductor's production 0.13 mu m SOI process to implement optical communications capability for high bandwidth LAN, SAN, shelf-to-shelf and chip-to-chip communications. These optical transceiver cores operate at 10Gbps and offer superior reach, power consumption, latency, die area, and scalability compared to emerging standards for electrical interconnect. They are monolithically fabricated alongside SOI CMOS circuitry in the same die. Thus, for the first time in history, high speed optical communications directly between silicon die can be accomplished at a price/performance point superior to traditional electrical interconnect.