The market prospect of silicon-based optoelectronic technology is very broad. According to the data of market research organization Yole, in 2020, the overall market size of the industry based on silicon-based optoelectronic technology will be about 80 million US dollars. By 2026, it is expected that the overall market size of the silicon-based optoelectronic technology industry will grow rapidly to US$1.1 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 49% from 2020 to 2026.
The application scenarios of silicon-based optoelectronic technology are widely distributed, and there has been a trend of industrialization in communication, lidar, sensing, and artificial intelligence optical computing. Especially in 2021, Rockley will cooperate with Apple to develop a spectrophotometer based on silicon-based optoelectronics, which can be used to measure data such as human lactate, body temperature, blood pressure, blood oxygen, and heart rate. It is expected that the device will be equipped with smartwatches, starting the industrialization process of silicon-based optoelectronics technology in consumer electronics. It is estimated that the market size of silicon-based optoelectronics in the field of consumer electronics will account for 43% of the total market size of the silicon-based optoelectronics industry in 2026.
Up to now, the most mature application scenario of silicon-based optoelectronic technology is still the optical communication industry. In 2020, the market size of silicon-based optoelectronic transceivers for optical communications will account for 98.9% of the total market for silicon-based optoelectronic technology industries. The products are mainly used in data center optical interconnection, long-distance backbone network optical interconnection and 5G fronthaul, etc. Among them, the data center is the main application scenario of silicon-based optoelectronic modules. The number of data center communication connections is large, the distance between nodes is short, the ambient temperature is relatively stable, and it is sensitive to the cost of optical modules.
Silicon-based optoelectronics has obvious advantages in the application of data centers. Therefore, silicon-based optoelectronic transceivers for data center optical communication account for 97% of the total size of silicon-based optoelectronics in the optical communication market. By 2026, it is expected that the main application of silicon-based optoelectronics technology in the field of optical communications will still focus on data center optical communications, and achieve a market size of around US$450 million at a compound annual growth rate of 26%.
In addition to data center applications, the overall capacity of the long-distance backbone network market is limited; and 5G application scenarios require high-temperature stability of optical transceivers. At the same time, the yield rate of silicon-based optoelectronic chip packaging is low at this stage, and the packaging cost is high. The overall cost of silicon-based optoelectronic modules has no significant advantage compared with traditional InP material optical modules. Due to the consideration of cost and stability in the market, silicon-based optoelectronic modules account for a small proportion of 5G applications. Further promoting the industrialization of silicon-based optoelectronics technology faces a series of challenges.
