A Vision for Thermally Integrated Photonics Systems

Thermal management has traditionally been relegated to the last step in the design process. However, with the exponential growth in data traffic leading to ever-greater levels of component integration and ever-higher levels of energy consumption, thermal management is rapidly becoming one of the most critical areas of research within the ICT industry. Given the vast use of optics for efficient transmission of high-speed data, this paper focuses on a new thermal solution for cooling the components within pluggable optical modules. Thermally Integrated Photonics Systems (TIPS) represents a new vision for the thermal building blocks required to enable exponential traffic growth in the global telecommunications network. In the TIPS program, existing thermal solutions cannot scale to meet the needs of exponential growth in data traffic. The main barriers to enabling further growth were identified and a research roadmap was developed around a scalable and efficient integrated thermal solution. In particular, the effects of replacing inefficient materials and large macroTECs with better thermal spreaders and μTECs are investidated. In addition, new forms of μChannel cooling into the package to more efficiently remove the heat generated by the lasers and the TECs are being studied which can lead to future photonic devices that can be deployed in a vastly more dense and integrated manner to address the requirements of future telecommunication networks.