The industry’s most innovative people 2024 Mark Wade Organisation: Ayar Labs


Role: President, Chief Scientist, and Co-Founder


Earlier this year, Mark Wade led the development of the first 4 terabit-per- second (Tbps) bidirectional Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical solution, demonstrated at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) in San Diego in March. Ayar Labs achieved this latest milestone


by working with leading high-volume manufacturing and supply partners, including GlobalFoundries, Lumentum, Macom, Sivers Photonics and others, to deliver the optical interconnects needed for data-intensive applications.


Markus Kogel-Hollacher


Organisation: Precitec Optronik Role: Head of R&D Projects department


“One thing will dominate my daily research routine in the near future – the automation of the industrial use of the laser as a reliable and safe tool,” says Markus Kogel- Hollacher, who won SPIE’s Prism Award at the start of the year. “Processes must be made more efficient


while reducing complexity for the end user,” he says. “For this, sensors have to be developed that detect process states in real time, process models have to be developed that suggest the exact measures to be taken, and modules have to be developed that can implement these measures immediately.”


Based in: Neu-Isenburg, Germany Education: PhD in Engineering Science


Kogel-Hollacher says he is constantly


working to make the use of lasers in industrial production more reliable, whether by applying specific methods such as process-specific intensity distribution or by using process monitoring and control devices in conjunction with AI methods. You can find Kogel-Hollacher on


LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ dr-markus-kogel-hollacher-6a3617b/. He plans to attend LKH2 Laser Colloquium Hydrogen Aachen; PLI Conference Rennes; ICALEO 2023; AIMEN Laser Workshop 2023; Photonics West 2024 and the SLPC Conference 2024.


Martin Ettenberg


Organisation: Princeton Infrared Technologies


Role: President and CEO


“Artificial intelligence combined with imaging products allowing people to be identified on the street could destroy privacy and damage the whole imaging industry,” Martin Ettenberg says. “Imaging has an incredible number of uses, but processing power combined with imagery could make for a dangerous combination.” Ettenberg is working on the wafer-scale


hybridisation of InGaAs to Si ROICs. This, he says, will lower the cost of InGaAs arrays and lead to smaller pitch devices. “The most surprising thing I’ve found is how bowed InGaAs wafers are after


Based in: Monmouth Junction, NJ, US Education: PhD in Materials Science, University of Virginia


growth”, he says. “I realised they had significant bow and stress, but I didn’t realise how much there was especially on 100mm wafers. Even though they are lattice matched they have enough stress to look like a potato chip under a microscope.” Over the next year, Ettenberg plans


to improve the dark current of Princeton Infrared Technologies’ new Type 2 Super Lattice structures for extended SWIR detection, which he says will lower the noise and reduce cooling power required from the firm’s cameras.


Based in: San Francisco, US


Education: PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder


Ayar Labs’ patented optical I/O


approach uses industry-standard silicon processing techniques to replace traditional electrical I/O with fast, high- density, low power optical I/O chiplets and multi-wavelength light sources. It announced in May 2023 that it has raised an additional $25m in Series C1 funding, bringing its total Series C raise to $155m. Wade is a class of 2011 NSF Fellow. He and his Ayar Labs co-founders won the MIT Clean Energy Prize, sponsored by the Department of Energy, in May 2015.


38 Photonics100 2024


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