EuroPIC interview
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Do companies need to be worried about compromising IP if they work with EuroPIC?
DR: We have drawn up non-disclosure agreement so we can work with our user group.
In the future we may have a brokering organization sitting between the application and the InP fab. Contracts between the broker and the fab, and the broker and the application holders can sew up IP in a completely watertight fashion.
How will SMEs work with the European PIC foundry to develop products and bring them to
market?
MS: If they have sufficient expertise in-house they can design their mask set. But we expect that most companies will not have that expertise, so we are also working on the creation of design houses to generate designs, just as you have design houses in microelectronics.
How is the foundry funded at the moment?
MS: Essentially European and national funding, with some matching funding from industry, depending on
the scheme. The COBRA research school at TU/e is underwriting JePPIX next year. COBRA runs training courses based in the university’s electrical engineering department on the design of the overall technology, and it occasionally offers multi-project wafer runs.
In the Netherlands we have the so-called Memphis (Merging Electronics and Micro & Nano-Photonics for Integrated Circuits) Smart Mix project. It’s a big and rather broad program, but there is substantial funding for this generic approach.
There is another program in the Netherlands: the STW Perpectief program GTIP, worth € 5.5 million, which is fully devoted to generic integration technologies. It will start at the end of this year.
DR: There is also PARADIGM (Photonic Adavanced Manufacturing Platform for Photonic Integrated Circuits), another EU project under negotiation, which will hopefully start in the early autumn. It can be viewed as a successor to EuroPIC. Paradigm will focus on technology developments, such as packaging and InP processing technologies.
Assuming that Paradigm is funded, we will then have € 20-30 million going into this area, spread over about twenty five different companies. This gives you a critical mass to make you feel that you can make a central European InP foundry a reality.
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Given all the talk about austerity measures by the governments of many European countries, are you concerned over future funding of EuroPIC?
MS: This technology will make product development much cheaper, which must be a good message in the current climate. For the coming two-to-three years foundry based R&D will be in a good position with secured funding. The critical point is this: will the commercial market for low-cost PICs grow fast enough?
DR: I would add that these austerity measures by the European governments are not over everything. Governments are trying to cut their government expenditure and stimulate their industries, and we are one of the industries that can stimulate growth.
PIC applications
EuroPIC is aiming to assist the development of devices based on PICs that can be deployed in a wide range of applications including:
Telecom access networks, where they can be used in offices to integrate many circuits, eliminating repetition for each subscriber or group of subscribers.
10 Gbit/s access networks, where they could become competitive in the subscriber transceiver module.
Fiber-based sensors that monitor the integrity of large constructions, such as bridges, dikes, roofs of large buildings and windmill propeller blades. The cost of the sensor is dominated by that of the readout unit - a light source, a detector and some signal processing circuitry – and a PIC could replace a significant part of the existing module. According to the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association, this market will be worth more than $1 billion in 2011.
Medical instruments, such as those based around the techniques of Optical Coherence Tomography or Raman Scatterometry. PICs fabricated from InP and its related alloys can operate at 1500 nm, a region of the infrared spectrum where the penetration depth in skin is relatively high.
High-speed pulse generators and clock recovery circuits; forms of ultrafast analog-to-digital-converters; and multi-photon microscopy. All three applications require lasers with very short pulse lengths, which can be produced with PICs featuring mode-locked lasers, optionally combined with pulse shapers.
Computer backplanes that use photonic interconnects to allow switching in the optical domain. A EuroPIC fast photonic switch could serve terabit- server backplanes, high-performance computing and multi-core architecture connections.
Radio-over-fiber systems providing wireless access. October 2010
www.compoundsemiconductor.net 35
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