Scintil Photonics is headquartered in France, with offices in the U.S. and Canada. It was founded by Sylvie Menezo, now Scintil’s chief technology officer and managing director, and Pascal Langlois, chairman of the board, in 2018, based on technology developed at CEA-Leti.
Laser Focus World: Can you introduce us to Scintil Photonics?
Matt Crowley: Scintil is an emerging leader within the silicon photonics space, and we’ve developed a disruptive technology platform called SHIP (Scintil heterogeneous integrated photonics) that integrates III-V and other materials into a standard silicon photonics process flow. This platform allows us to create totally disruptive products such as tiny, ultraprecise dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) integrated laser sources for artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.
LFW: How is Scintil differentiating itself within the PICs realm?
Crowley: We’re differentiated by our proprietary approach to integrating III-V with silicon photonics. Our SHIP process technology enables the fabrication of photonic circuits, including active and passive devices such as distributed feedback (DFB) lasers, silicon modulators, germanium photodetectors, silicon nitride waveguides, and demultiplexer onto a single chip.
LFW: Any integration challenges to overcome?
Crowley: Our backside-on-box approach enables monolithic integration of silicon and indium phosphide (InP)/III-V materials. Unprocessed InP/III-V die are bonded onto the backside of processed wafers only where needed. Our fabrication process is built on the standard silicon-photonics process, so we’ve partnered with Tower Semiconductor to bring our SHIP process technology to high-volume manufacturing.
LFW: Are you encountering any manufacturing challenges?
Crowley: Process development is always a challenge—especially when breaking new ground and working with new materials. It’s taken us time to perfect the process and bring the yields up to an acceptable level, but by running enough wafers and using rigorous engineering discipline we’ve been able to mature the process.
LFW: Any surprises involved in getting a PIC company launched?
Crowley: One positive surprise was the emergence of the AI data center as the fastest growing market for PICs. Traditional telecom is still a huge market, but implementing optical networking into the fast-growing AI data center market presents a huge opportunity.
LFW: What benefits can PICs offer to data centers and AI?
Crowley: Our current focus is on AI data centers, specifically the network that connects 100 or more graphics processing units (GPUs) to provide the aggregate compute power required to train the newest AI models. Copper cables have reached their performance limits in terms of speed and range and all major industry players agree that optical interconnects are required for AI accelerator scale-up networks that demand speed, latency, density, and power efficiency.
In general, silicon PICs provide the performance, volume, reliability, integration, and cost for optical systems that microelectronics provided for electrical systems.
LFW: Most intriguing things you’re seeing emerge within the PICs realm?
Crowley: One exciting trend we’re seeing is copackaged optics become mainstream due to the significant improvement in power savings and latency that it can achieve. Moving to DWDM copackaged optics promises to vastly improve AI data center networking and enable massive scaling with terrific power savings, latency, and density.
This emerging copackaged DWDM architecture requires the finest, high-precision multiwavelength light source to efficiently transmit data. Scintil is the first company to demonstrate a high-reliability light source that meets all of the system needs at an acceptable size and cost.
Visit Scintil online at www.scintil-photonics.com.