The IFIP/IEEE International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI-SoC 2017) is the 25th in a series of international conferences sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committee (IFIP TC) 10 Working Group 5, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), By the end of 2017, IP traffic will have exceeded the data rate of 100 ExaBytes (EB) per month with the expected cumulative average growth rate (CAGR) over the next few years being around 24%.

The adoption of IPv6 in support of the Internet of Things (IoT) will result in CAGR of 74% of IPv6 traffic, reaching more than 50 EB per month in 2020. IoT will also drive the significant increase in machine-to-machine connections and traffic to reach the 10 EB mark in 2020. Integrated optics, and more particularly Si photonics, is the hardware technology most suitable for supporting such data traffic growth at all stages of the data path from end devices to servers, gateways, data centers, and WANs. The large-scale deployment of Si photonics technology is however still facing major challenges not unlike those that the IC industry faced in its early days. These challenges include a fragmented process technology; a high entry threshold for new designs; proprietary processes, components and tools; high design costs; and lack of skilled Si photonics designers.

The objective of the PhotoSoC 2017 workshop is to be an international forum for academia and industry to discuss these challenges and present the most recent advances in tackling them. The vision of the workshop is to systematically address the enablement of a low-cost, high-volume Si photonics roadmap for system design in support of the accelerated growth of end devices, data aggregators and network traffic. Industry and academia speakers who are deeply involved in the design and deployment of complex Si photonics solutions for data acquisition, communication, and processing will be invited to present their vision and latest research in Si photonics. The workshop will also feature refereed poster presentations on specialized topics in Si photonics.