Global heavyweight technology giants are aggressively attacking silicon photon technology. According to media reports, the Japanese government will provide approximately 45 billion yen to support the collaboration between Intel, SK Hynix, and NTT in the development of next-generation silicon photonics technology; According to the supply chain, TSMC has invested a research and development team of over a hundred people, working together with international major clients to jointly develop silicon photon technology. It is expected to be completed in the second half of 2024 and enter mass production in 2025. In terms of A-shares, Bochuang Technology, which has docked with Intel for 800G silicon optical solutions, closed up over 10% on the last trading day before the Spring Festival, while Yuanjie Technology, which is developing a 100mW high-power silicon optical laser project, rose over 13%.
With the rapid development of AI, silicon photon technology has gradually expanded from communication to computing infrastructure and downstream applications, including inter board chip optical interconnection, intra chip chiplet optical interconnection, optical computing, and LiDAR. Liu Yongxu and others from CITIC Securities stated in their research report on December 29, 2023 that the significant increase in the parameter count of multimodal large models has led to an explosion in data transmission demand, and the transmission bandwidth of data between GPU and Switch, as well as between GPU and HBM, has become a bottleneck for the entire system. Silicon optical engines significantly increase transmission bandwidth and are currently one of the best forms of optical I/O products. In the field of chip interconnection, it is imperative for "light to enter and copper to exit", and silicon photonics has ushered in a golden development opportunity.
According to Yole's data, the CAGR of the market size of silicon photonic chips reached 44% from 2022 to 2028, with digital optical modules accounting for over 90% of the silicon photonic chip market, which is the main application scenario. Silicon photonics has advantages such as compatibility with mature CMOS processes, high integration, simplified packaging processes, low cost, and low power consumption. Compared with traditional optical modules, when upgrading from 400G to 800G and 1.6T, the number of channels in mainstream solutions is upgraded from four to eight, and the manufacturing process steps are significantly increased. However, silicon photonics chips only need to design four more channels, resulting in less process changes and lower costs.
Intel has launched the FPGA commercial product Stratix 10 using optical interconnect technology, as well as the pan processor XPU product using silicon optical interconnect technology. Companies represented by Lightmatter and Lightintelligence have launched new silicon based computing chips such as Envise, which have far superior performance than current AI computing chips. Taking running the BERT natural language model as an example, Envise's speed is five times faster than Nvidia chips, and its power consumption is only one sixth of the latter.
The upstream of the silicon photon technology industry chain includes optical chip design, SOI substrates, epitaxial wafers, and foundries, while the midstream includes optical module manufacturers, and the downstream is divided into the digital communication field and the telecommunications field. Manufacturers such as Intel, Zhongji Xuchuang, Coherent, Cisco, and Marvell have both PIC design and module integration capabilities, and maintain close cooperation with downstream cloud vendors and AI giants, with significant advantages and a clear leading role in the supply chain.
From the market competition pattern of silicon optical modules, Cisco and Intel's market share is far ahead of other manufacturers. In 2022, the market size of the optical module telecommunications industry is 1.2 billion US dollars, with Cisco's share of 49% and Lumentum's share of 30%; The market size of the data communication field is 510 million US dollars, with Intel accounting for 61% and Cisco accounting for 20%. However, Liu Yongxu and others believe that with the significant increase in demand for high-speed optical modules such as 400G and 800G, the silicon optical solutions of leading optical module companies are in a leading position in the industry. Companies such as Zhongji Xuchuang, Coherent, and Xin Yisheng are expected to gain most of the market share and disrupt the competitive landscape in the industry.
According to incomplete statistics from Caixin News Agency, in addition to Zhongji Xuchuang and Xinyisheng, A-share listed companies that have laid out silicon photonics technology also include Robotech, Cambridge Technology, Huagong Technology, Changguang Huaxin, Yandong Micro, Tianfu Communication, Juguang Technology, Yuanjie Technology, Bochuang Technology, and Shijia Photonics. The specific situation is shown in the following figure: