ANALYSIS: THE PHOTONICS 100
The Photonics100: where is the growth?
We asked this year’s Photonics100 honourees which photonics sector showed the most potential for growth in the next 12 months?
Artificial intelligence (AI) “A photonic AI accelerator is the most promising area in the next 12 months. AI is extremely power-hungry and the requirement of compute power is exploding, which conventional digital electronics is struggling to keep up with. Photonics is a promising solution due to its ultra-fast clock, ultra-high energy efficiency, and vast amount of parallelisms.” Xianxin Guo, Head of Research, Lumai “The opportunities around AI and ML are huge. Large training models and AI clusters are driving huge bandwidth in and around data centres. There are huge opportunities for growth in that market sector. The second space that has huge potential is the edge of the network. All data is generated and consumed at the edge of the network. To enable new, low-latency applications, data centres are moving closer to the edge. Coherent transceiver technology will move with it – offering many opportunities for growth in our industry.” Robert Maher, CTO, Infinera “With the AI and computing revolution, there might be a big opportunity for photonics.” David Domenech, CTO, VLC Photonics
“Photonic ultra-high-speed interconnects, especially for AI.” Moshe Nazarathy, Active Professor Emeritus, Technion, Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering “Technological solutions working at the interface of AI and photonics can be incredibly powerful. I can see more of those being developed and rapidly spreading in many fields.” Ilaria Testa, Associate Professor, KTH, Scilifelab
Quantum computing “Photonic quantum computers. Within a photonic quantum computer, qubits are created, manipulated, and measured using well-established optical components like beam splitters, phase shifters, and detectors. A significant advantage of photonic quantum computers is their potential for scalability.” Ruti Ben Shlomi, CEO and co-founder, LightSolver “I am convinced that future scalable universal quantum computers will be photonic quantum computers. The fact that you can use quantum effects at room temperature because the photon does not experience any noise is, for me, the most important argument for practical
systems.” Joachim Horwath, CTO, Mynaric
Integrated photonics & PICs “Packaging. This is one of the first steps to make PICs more accessible and usable.” Antonio Teixeira, Founder and CSTO, senior researcher, full professor PICadvanced, Instituto de Telecomunicações, U of Aveiro “I see significant growth opportunities via the rapid advances in PICs, particularly as these systems move to alternative wavelengths in the visible range and away from more common telecommunications- focused wavelength regions (e.g. around 1,550 nm). Visible wavelength active and passive PICs have tremendous potential for revolutionising sensing and computing applications.” Garrett Cole, Manager, Thorlabs Crystalline Solutions, Thorlabs “I see great opportunities in the area of PICs.” Georg Böcherer, Principal Engineer, Huawei Technologies “Integrated photonics is poised for significant growth in the next 12 months. With its compact and efficient optical solutions – particularly in data communication, sensing, and medical devices – it addresses industry demands for advanced miniaturisation.” Evangelos Skoulas, CTO, Biomimetic “I think we will see integrated designs that combine optics and sensors in an integrated package. Think of a lens integrated into the cover glass of a sensor.” Felix Heide, Co-Founder and CTO, Algolux
Joachim Horwath, CTO, Mynaric 10 Electro Optics May 2024
Xianxin Guo, Head of Research, Lumai
Silicon photonics “Silicon photonics. In the future multidimensional information society, I think that the demand for data communication will increase and the demand will also increase in terms of energy efficiency.” Kenichi Otsuka, Section Manager, Hamamatsu Photonics “The investment in silicon photonics is likely to produce significant opportunities in the next 12 months. The promise of faster data transmission speeds, lower latencies, lower power, and improved thermal performance will usher in a host of new innovations.” Ian Blasch, Senior Director R&D, Jabil
In association with
Medical & biophotonics “I see the healthcare and biophotonics sector as having the biggest opportunity for growth in the next 12 months, due to an ageing population, increased focus on non-invasive medical procedures, and the development of new imaging and sensing techniques.” Judith Su, Associate Professor, The University of Arizona “Medical – we are all getting older and living longer and we need to make sure that we stay ahead of the advances in photonics for medical applications.” Eliana Fu, Industry Manager: Aerospace and Medical, TRUMPF “I see photonics becoming more embedded within healthcare and, especially, personal medical devices since photonic structures can be ultrasmall and cheap to fabricate now. Smart sensors for wearable biomonitoring – for example, within smartwatches or earbuds – is becoming more of a reality, although we’ll likely still see initial mass deployment of chipscale spectrometers in industry.” Lia Li, CEO, Zero Point Motion “In biomedical optics and quantum photonics, we are edging closer and closer to the next breakthrough. This could be in diagnostics, therapeutic or monitoring techniques of the human body, with a key focus on pushing brain imaging beyond current boundaries. Herein lies the biggest opportunity for growth.” Akhil Kallepalli, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Glagsow “Medtech and biotech are markets that can benefit from existing technology, thus they are more favourable to grow faster next year.” Barbara Buades, CEO and co-founder, MEETOPTICS “I think there is still a lot of opportunity in the bio-photonics sector. Linking photonics and bio-tech in an easy-to-use way will allow for new research breakthroughs as well as new products.” Michael Thiel, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Nanoscribe
Optical communications “As the need for faster, more efficient data communication continues to soar, photonic
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