Interest in photonic chips is expanding at lightning speed. The market for silicon photonics is expected to quintuple from 2020 ($516 million) to 2025 — reaching $2.6 billion, according to Gartner. In fact, speed is one of the three factors driving this accelerated growth.
Photonic chips transmit signals with light instead of electricity. The advantage of photonics over electronics is that light is faster and more functional over large bandwidths. The most common method of deploying photonics in chip design currently is silicon photonics, which pairs photonic architecture with traditional circuits in a single chip.