Abstract:
The recently established American Institute for Manufacturing Photonics (AIM Photonics) is a manufacturing consortium headquartered in NY, with funding from the US Department of Defense, New York State, California and Massachusetts, and industrial partners to advance the state of the art in the design, manufacture, testing, assembly, and packaging of integrated photonic devices. Dr. Michael Liehr, CEO of AIM Photonics, will describe the technical goals, operational framework, near-term milestones, and opportunities for the broader photonics community.
The scope of AIM Photonics will span several industry segments, with the most prominent and near term commercial segment of Datacom applications, to analog/RF, array and sensor applications that are expected to mature at a later time. Photonic Integrated Circuits (PIC) technology enables optical systems to be miniaturized and fabricated on semiconductor chips. Just as electronic integrated circuits revolutionized electronics by miniaturizing transistor circuitry, PICs integrate lasers and other optical devices to route and process information with reduced size and power. PICs can also scale in complexity to do things that would not be possible using conventional optical design approaches. By putting these components on a single platform, PICs have the potential to advance technology in ways never before possible. Targeted markets include:
- Ultra-high-speed transmission of signals for the internet and telecommunications
- New high-performance information-processing systems and computing
- Compact biomedical sensor applications enabling dramatic medical advances in diagnostics and treatment
- Multi-sensor applications including urban navigation, free space optical communications, and quantum information sciences
- Other military applications, including electronic warfare, analog RF sensing, communications, and chemical/biological detection
The institute will focus most of its resource to develop an infrastructure in electronic-photonic design automation, a multi project wafer offering, as well as test, assembly and packaging. These efforts are focused on the support of larger companies, SMEs, universities and federal agency needs. The industry paradigm shifts create a number of design, packaging, and assembly challenges that must be addressed before PIC technology can make its way into broad-based commercialization and volume manufacturing. AIM Photonics believes its collaborative approach will put in place an end-to-end photonics “ecosystem” that includes domestic foundry access, integrated design tools, automated packaging, assembly and testing, and workforce development, plus create a standardized platform to make it easier to scale the technology across multiple markets for companies of all sizes.
We have established AIM Academy, an organization under the institute that fosters education. A key tenet for AIM Photonics is to develop and ensure a well-trained workforce through the AIM Photonics Academy. This effort is designed to provide a unified learning, training, knowledge, technology and workforce deployment platform. The goal is to attract and retain community college, undergraduate, graduate students and veterans and help them prepare for careers in the photonics industry. Through the academy these students will have access to internships, apprenticeships, and classes on photonic system modeling, design automation, materials and processing, metrology and testing, integrated photonics packaging and integrated photonics applications.
Lastly, we are executing a plan to closely coordinate and merge with the existing integrated photonics roadmapping activity to use the resulting “grand challenges” as input into the “funnel” for down selection to AIM member-driven projects..