Optical Chips, Undercurrents Surging
This in depth analysis reveals the three tier landscape of photonic chip materials, comparing silicon photonics, TFLN, and ferroelectric PZT/BTO across optical transmission and AI computing scenarios.
Against the backdrop of continuous expansion of large AI models and the exponential surge in data center bandwidth demand, the industry has formed three hard requirements for photonic chips: high-speed transmission, low power consumption, and flexible scheduling. The competitive logic of the sector has shifted—competition no longer focuses solely on the upper-layer architectural design of chips; the physical properties of underlying optical materials have become the core key to determining the upgrade of next-generation optical communications and breakthroughs in photonic computing power. Currently, mainstream photonic materials each have their own trade-offs, and there is still no all-purpose solution that can cover every scenario.
Among the many materials, silicon photonics (SiPh) chips are currently the most commercially mature photonic material that has already achieved mass production. They rely on the thermo-optic effect for signal modulation, resulting in relatively slow modulation response speeds and persistently high static power consumption during operation.
Indium phosphide (InP), as the core material for traditional active photonic chips, delivers outstanding modulation rates, but its epitaxial preparation process is complex, compatible wafer sizes are relatively small, and the cost of scaled mass production is difficult to reduce. Thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) offers advantages of high-speed and low optical-loss modulation.
However, once applied to photonic computing-in-memory scenarios, its shortcomings become very prominent: devices must remain continuously powered to maintain normal operation, and the computational weights stored internally are lost immediately upon power-off. Lead zirconate titanate (PZT) and barium titanate (BTO), as emerging ferroelectric electro-optic materials, are developing rapidly. Both materials possess dual characteristics of high-speed electro-optic modulation and non-volatile storage, and they are now key frontier directions being explored in the global photonic computing field.
