By invitation: Professor Roel Baets on Silicon Photonics 4.0

Roel Baets, Emeritus Professor at Ghent University and former Group Leader at imec gave a plenary talk on 'Silicon Photonics 4.0' at the recent ECOC conference. "It will be important for silicon photonics to make use of smart and agile manufacturing, a notion associated with Industry 4.0," said Professor Baets, explaining the title.

In a guest piece, he explains his thoughts and discusses what he saw at ECOC. He also has a request.

Source: ECOC

One of the things I discussed in my ECOC plenary talk was the large gap between research and product development for new applications of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) on the one hand, and product sales and new industrial process flows on the other.

Among many reasons for this gap, one stands out: the major barriers that fabless start-ups face when developing a product based on a still immature industrial supply chain.

This often implies that part of the start-up's non-recurring engineering (NRE) budget needs to be spent on co-investment in a new process flow by a technology provider, which can easily be too expensive for a start-up. The growing diversity in materials added to silicon photonics process flows to meet the needs of new applications is a major compounding factor in this context.

I showed a slide that listed the companies that I am aware of that sell non-transceiver products based on PICs (silicon or other). I try to keep this list up to date with my Ghent University colleague, Prof. Wim Bogaerts, chair of ePIXfab. The slide showed only seven companies, while there are probably between 100 and 200 companies around the world that develop such products.

These companies are Genalyte (biosensors for diagnostics), Anello (optical gyroscope), Sentea and PhotonFirst (fibre Bragg grating readout), Quix (quantum processor), Thorlabs (>100GHz opto-electronic converter) and iPronics (originally a programmable photonic processor company now focussing on optical switching). These companies will likely sell only in modest numbers, but at least they sell a product.

After my talk, I eagerly went to the ECOC exhibition in the hope of spotting additional companies. I found two that I could add to the list: Chilas (tunable low-linewidth lasers) and SuperLight Photonics (supercontinuum lasers).

A few weeks later, I discovered yet another fledgling company ready to sell: hQphotonics (ultra-low-noise microwave oscillators). So the list is double-digit now! Perhaps this is an important milestone towards Silicon Photonics 4.0.

Interestingly, four of those ten companies use Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology, four use silicon nitride PICs, one uses InP, and one uses thin-film Lithium Niobate (TFLN).

Undoubtedly, the list is incomplete. There may be other companies with a product (not just a prototype or a demo kit or a technology service) that we do not know.

So let me make a call to contact me if you know of any company not on the list of ten that sells a non-transceiver product based on PICs.

roel.baets@ugent.be