OPINION: THE PHOTONICS100 →
Moreover, exploring alternative technologies or components that are less reliant on the constrained electronic supply chain can offer a buffer against potential disruptions.” Mark Filer, Area Tech Lead, Photonics, Stealth Start-up: “Supply chain issues still aren’t fully resolved from the Covid-era bottlenecks, with some parts still experiencing excessive lead times. Additional fab capacity slated to come online in the next 12-18 months, along with expanding manufacturing capabilities (Asia, Central, and North America) to support the onslaught of AI/ML-driven bandwidth growth, should help mitigate the vestiges of supply constraint on the photonics side.” Bradford Behr, CTO,
Tornado Spectral Systems: “Remaining supply chain issues from the pandemic, and “robustifying” those supply chains against future disruptions.”
Plenty of the feedback we received could also have been grouped by specific themes. Here is our pick of those overarching themes keeping us all awake at night:
Global instability and market changes Eliana Fu, Industry Manager: Aerospace & Medical, TRUMPF: “The global economy doesn’t seem to be doing well so a very real risk is just reduced spending industrially generally. Instead of spending on new
technology, people are choosing to hunker down with what they already have, instead of viewing this as an opportunity to actually improve their business with efficient, modern processes.”
Squeezed photonics funding and inflation Ibrahim Abdulhalim, Professor, Ben Gurion University of the Negev: “Manufacturing low-cost nanoscale structures at a large scale is a bottleneck to the development of high-potential devices to become reasonably priced so that it will bring them into use in many systems and real applications. As of now, these facilities are limited to foundries, which make their production very expensive. The process of development itself is very expensive. More funding is required in such enabling technologies that will cause revolutionary developments in many other fields.” Marc Hummel, Scientific
Employee, Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology: “The photonics industry has established itself as a key technology in all sectors in recent years. In order to further scale the production of photonic components and to reduce their prices, an immense amount of research has to be done. The development steps must be able to keep up with the demands from the industry and the manufacturing costs for photonic components must be reduced by several orders
Ibrahim Abdulhalim, Professor, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
of magnitude, as well as the global output of manufactured components must be increased by several orders of magnitude. Only in this way can the high demand for photonic components be met in the future.”
Energy efficiency Jose Pozo, CTO, Optica: “This year’s OFC Conference raised the biggest dilemma of the last decade. How do we save power now? To reduce power we need to tackle three things separately: “Number One: DSPs! OFC 2023 will always be remembered as the venue where we raised the question: what is the future of DSPs in data transceivers? At a recent Optica Executive
Ruti Ben Shlomi, CEO and Co-Founder, LightSolver 12 Electro Optics February 2024
Forum, Andreas Bechtholsheim, co-founder of Arista Networks, raised every eyebrow in the room. He stated that the future is linear drive optics, which compared with current DSP Optics, offer power savings of 25% for 51.2T switch, or even 30% for a 102.4T switch. I wonder how DSP suppliers like MaxLinear, Credo, Broadcom Inc. or Marvell Technology will react? “Number Two: Silicon photonics modulators. Our OFC Rump Session this year about the future of silicon photonics showed that we needed to be more inclusive. New materials are coming to silicon photonics, offering major advantages in speed and power consumption. And you know the list: lithium niobate from HyperLight, Advanced Fiber Resources, Sumitomo Electric, Liobate or Ori-Chip
Marc Hummel, Scientific Employee, Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology
Optoelectronics Technology; polymer from Lightwave Logic, NLM Photonics or SilOriX, plasmonics from Polariton Technologies; or BTO from Lumiphase. “People keep asking me who
is going to win. I don’t have a crystal ball; maybe they all win! Over the last decade, people have been asking if silicon photonics or Indium phosphide (InP) would win, and the answer is they both won! Ask Dave Welch from Infinera if InP is not successful! Or ask Michael Hochberg if he ever regretted dedicating his life to silicon photonics after selling Elenion Technologies to Nokia! So maybe they all win again! “Number three: The light
source. So how do we reduce the power consumption of the light sources? That’s easy: use less of them or make them more efficient. This OFC saw the rise of Avicena Tech. They made a bold move by bringing LEDs to datacom: affordable and efficient. Well, ask Chris Pfistner; he’ll gladly show you! On the other hand, new approaches using comb lasers by companies like Alfalume, Quintessent or Enlightra are breaking new frontiers in wavelength division multiplexing. “Above all, I would encourage decision makers to keep talking to each other if they want to influence the major change coming very soon.” Robert Maher, Chief
Technology Officer, Infinera: “In general, the industry is robust. There are near-term headwinds with inventory
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