With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, cloud services, and 5G technology, data centers are expanding at an unprecedented speed. Optical transceivers, acting as the "highways" of data transmission, face tough challenges in thermal management and reliability. Against this backdrop, high-accuracy NTC chips have become one of the core components ensuring the stable operation of AI optical transceivers.

Thermal Management: The Tough Challenge Face by AI Optical Transceivers

In AI data centers, optical transceivers are responsible for converting electrical signals to optical signals and vice versa, making them critical for high-speed, large-capacity data transmission. However, as transmission rates and integration levels increase, power consumption inside the optical transceivers rises sharply. The core component—the laser diode—is highly sensitive to temperature changes. Even a slight temperature increase can cause the laser wavelength to drift, leading to reduced communication quality, transmission errors, and even permanent device damage. This is especially critical in long-distance transmission and AI large model training, where wavelength stability requirements are extremely strict. Therefore, precise temperature management is no longer optional—it's essential.

Solution: Wire-bondable NTC Chips

To tackle thermal management challenge of optical transceiver, the industry widely uses wire-bondable NTC chips as the core components for temperature sensing and feedback. Regardless of design type, the NTC is placed next to the laser diode for temperature monitoring, as shown below:

From a structural application perspective, NTC chips used in optical transceivers should have the following key technical characteristics:

1. Miniaturization: To fit into the compact packaging space of optical transceiver, the dimension of NTC should be as small as possible. Especially in silicon photonics designs, NTC may be integrated on the silicon photonics, requiring even smaller dimension. Whether used with TEC or not, NTC needs very fast response times, and the smaller the NTC, the faster it responds.

2. High Accuracy: Ensures accurate temperature monitoring, providing a reliable basis for temperature regulation (such as TEC adjustment) and preventing compensation errors due to measurement inaccuracies.

3. Excellent Reliability: Once encapsulated in an optical transceiver, NTC chip is almost impossible to repair or replace. Failure of an NTC can render the module unusable, so long lifespan is required. To withstand harsh environments inside the transceiver, such as sulfuration, high-end NTCs will use gold (Au) termination technology. Gold termination offers excellent resistance to oxidation and sulfuration, effectively preventing metal ion migration and maintaining low resistance drift over a service life of up to 30 years, ensuring long-term stable operation of the optical transceiver.

4. Connectivity: In optical transceiver, NTC chip interconnections include wire bonding and die bonding. Wire bonding primarily uses gold wire, while die bonding uses silver paste or eutectic solder connections.

EXSENSE self-developed and mass-produced optical transceiver gold transceiver NTC chip achieve a size of 0.21mm × 0.21mm. It has excellent termination connectivity, suitable for bonding with gold/copper wires, as well as silver paste or eutectic solder. The accuracy of EXSENSE optical transceiver gold termination NTC chip ranges from 1% to 3% and performs exceptionally well in high-temperature storage, meeting customer’s lifespan requirements. It has been used in design solutions for major mainstream optical transceiver manufacturers.

In current AI-driven era of explosive computing power, the thermal management of optical transceiver directly impacts the energy efficiency and performance of the entire data center. Choosing the right NTC temperature control solution has become an important strategy to enhance optical transceiver competitiveness and ensure stable operation of AI infrastructure. High-accuracy, excellent-reliability EXSENSE gold termination NTC chip is providing a solid temperature monitoring foundation for the construction of next-generation high-speed optical network.