ANALYSIS PHOTONIC INTEGRATION
Effect Photonics banks optical
A European start-up claims to have found a more cost- effective way to produce photonic integrated circuits, as Pauline Rigby discovers
D
evelopments that could lead to a significant reduction in the cost of photonic integrated circuits lie behind the announcement of a series A
funding round for Dutch start-up, Effect Photonics. Te first close of the investment round was led
by Swiss investors b-to-v Partners, and included the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) and Optidob from the Netherlands. Te amount was not disclosed. Te funding will allow the company to move
to the next stage of its growth, with product news expected in the autumn, according to CEO James Regan. ‘Te announcement is really that Effect Photonics is here. We’re funded, we’re running, we’re ramping our headcount, we’re ramping up our facilities,’ he said. Founded in 2010, Effect Photonics says it has
optimised a process for building highly integrated optical components at low cost. Te company isn’t ready to give out product details, but says it is using an indium-phosphide-based optical chip to target DWDM applications on the edge of the network. ‘Tere’s a bandwidth crunch coming at the
edges of the network,’ said Regan. ‘Dramatically increasing consumer demand for mobile video is driving a wave of data through cell towers and between data centres that is expected to rise ten times over the next four years.’ He points to the increasing use of DWDM in mobile fronthaul applications as well as in data centre optical interconnection and soon fibre-to-the-home (see Fibre Systems Winter 2015, p22). Te start-up felt that the answer to the
bandwidth crunch was going to be dense WDM, 14 FIBRE SYSTEMS Issue 7 • Spring 2015 Effect Photonics founder and CTO, Boudewijn Docter, examines a photolithography mask
A great deal of European money has gone into this vision
just as it had been in long haul and metro networks. ‘Te answer is always dense WDM,’ said Regan. ‘You can use dense WDM to respond to bandwidth demands in the access and the edges of the network, but you have to hit a very low cost point to do it. We felt we could do that with our technology.’ If Effect Photonics really can deliver highly
integrated components at low cost, then it will have achieved something exceptional. While a number of components and systems vendors have produced photonic integrated circuits, the process and products tend to be complicated to
develop and therefore expensive – achieving only one out of the two aims. Effect Photonics is off to a good start, however.
Te start-up benefits from photonic integration research spanning more than a decade at one of Europe’s leading universities in the field. It is a spin-out from the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e), where Professor Meint Smit and his team have been developing what they call ‘generic integration’. Regan explained the concept: ‘Te photonics
industry has for too long tried to build their complex circuits where they fiddle with every element in the design. When you design an ASIC, you don’t mess with the transistors; what you do is build standard building blocks and you design complex circuits out of those building blocks with abstracted design tools. We need a similar methodology for photonics.’ Effect Photonics was co-founded by TU/e
researcher Boudewijn Docter, now its chief technology officer, who for his PhD developed a
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integration expertise
Eric Brinkhorst Fotografie
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