Two Switches Project to Open the Door to a Golden Age of Silicon Photonics

JOEL WILLIAMS, NEWS EDITOR
joel.williams@photonics.com

NVIDIA’s planned commercialization of its Spectrum-X (Ethernet) and Quantum-X (InfiniBand) photonic switches signals a shift in the industry’s copper bedrock. According to PhotonDelta’s ecosystem manager Abdul Rahim, it could mark the beginning of “the golden age of silicon photonics.”

That a company of NVIDIA’s scale is introducing silicon photonics-based co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions is indicative of the technology’s maturity level — reaching a point where it is both commercially viable and technically necessary, said René Jonker, executive vice president for the edge and cloud AI division at Soitec, a designer and manufacturer of semiconductor materials.

“Photonics is no longer a niche solution, but a tangible, necessary advancement for the future of data centers,” he said.

“It is no longer something that no one’s heard of,” said Jorn Smeets, PhotonDelta’s managing director for North America.

Taking account of NVIDIA’s past success in developing and marketing copper-based technology, and its commitment to doing so, places the product announcements in context — and in an even bigger spotlight. “We have reached a tipping point where even NVIDIA is saying, 'For the scale-out of the data center, it’s better if we can go immediately into the optics domain,’” Smeets said.

During the company’s GTC 2025 event earlier this week, NVIDIA itself seemed to be signaling a tipping point — not just with the introduction of Spectrum-X and Quantum-X, but with company CEO Jensen Huang coining the term “AI factories” to describe a new class of extreme scale data centers. Networking infrastructure, he said, has to be reinvented to keep pace.

CPO and silicon photonics have shown immense potential, but largely in R&D settings and controlled deployments. The technologies face significant logistical and financial barriers for commercialization. It has required a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort to get them off the ground.

The switches unveiled earlier this week by NVIDIA are the result of close collaboration between Coherent, Lumentum, Corning, Foxconn, SENKO, and others.

For PhotonDelta, the introduction of NVIDIA's chips serves as a proof point for the value of an integrated ecosystem. According to Smeets and Rahim, the announcement charts a course not only for data center applications, but for advancements in areas such as sensing, quantum, lidar, and point of care diagnostics.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of diversity and a lot of different types of solutions,” Smeets said.

“The beauty of photonics technologies is that there are so many degrees of freedom which people can play with to always come up with a solution which is a little different from someone else’s,” Rahim said. The near limitless variations in wavelengths, materials, and architectures, he said, enable countless technology and product opportunities, including those that NVIDIA is pioneering.

Beyond the range of supported technologies, NVIDIA’s endorsement of silicon photonics is also expected to have a ripple effect through the industry, bringing focus to the importance of supply chain readiness, and technological standardization. With the breakthrough attracting international attention, the technology has hit the mainstream.