The making of integrated optics

A US initiative is bringing together leading companies with top academics and universities to create a manufacturing infrastructure for the widespread adoption of integrated photonics.

The US sees integrated photonics as a strategic technology and has set up the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics - AIM Photonics - to advance the technology and make it available to a wider community of companies. AIM Photonics, with $610 million of public and private funding, is a five-year initiative ending in 2020. AIM’s long-term goal is to be self-sustaining.

Doug Coolbaugh

“Right now the infrastructure is focussed on electronics and CMOS but photonics is going to be the future,” says Doug Coolbaugh, chief operations officer at AIM Photonics. “There is no other way to do it [very high bandwidth] except using light for ultra fast communications.”

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Juniper Networks to acquire Aurrion for $165 million

The announcement of the acquisition was low key. A CTO blog post and a statement that Juniper Networks had entered into an agreement to acquire Aurrion, the fabless silicon photonics start-up. No fee was mentioned.

However, in the company's US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Juniper values the deal at approximately $165 million. "The Company believes the acquisition will help to fuel its long-term competitive advantage by enabling cost-effective, high-density, high-speed optical networks," it said. The deal is expected to be closed this quarter.

Source: Gazettabyte

At first glance, Juniper is simply the latest in a series of systems vendors bringing silicon photonics in-house. Silicon photonics is a technology that allows photonic devices to be made on a silicon substrate, fabricated in a CMOS facility.

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Richard Soref: The new frontiers of silicon photonics

Silicon photonics luminaries series

Interview 4: Professor Richard Soref

John Bowers acknowledges him with ‘kicking off’ silicon photonics some 30 years ago, while Andrew Rickman refers to him as the ‘founding father of silicon photonics’. An interview with Richard Soref. 

It was fibre-optic communications that started Professor Richard Soref on the path to silicon photonics.

“In 1985, the only photonic chip that could interface to fibre was the III-V semiconductor chip,” says Soref. He wondered if an elemental chip such as silicon could be used, and whether it might even do a better job. He had read in a textbook that silicon is relatively transparent at the 1.30-micron and 1.55-micron wavelengths used for telecom and it inspired him to look at silicon as a material for optical waveguides.

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Mario Paniccia: We are just at the beginning

Silicon photonics luminaries series

Interview 2: Mario Paniccia

 

Talking about his time heading Intel’s silicon photonics development programme, Mario Paniccia, spotlights a particularly creative period between 2002 and 2008.  

 

During that time, his Intel team had six silicon photonics papers published in the science journals, Nature and Nature Photonics, and held several world records - for the fastest modulator, first at 1 gigabit, then 10 gigabit and finally 40 gigabit, the first pulsed and continuous-wave Raman silicon laser, the first hybrid silicon laser working with The University of California, Santa Barbara, and the fastest silicon germanium photo-detector operating at 40 gigabit.

 

“These [achievements] were all in one place, labs within 100 yards of each other; you had to pinch yourself sometimes,” he says.

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US invests $610 million to spur integrated photonics

The US government has set up its latest manufacturing initiative, the sixth of nine, to address photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The $610 million venture is a combination of public and private funding: $110 million from the Department of Defense, $250 million from the state of New York and the rest private contributions.

Prof. Duncan Moore

Dubbed the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics), the venture has attracted 124 partners includes 20 universities and over 50 companies.

The manufacturing innovation institute will be based in Rochester, New York, and will be led by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York. A key goal is that the manufacturing institute will continue after the initiative is completed in early 2021.

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