Photonics is a major focus for key electronics suppliers for a number of reasons. Emerging trends like integrated photonics, silicon photonics, and quantum photonics are expected to significantly advance data processing, communications, and quantum computing over the next decade. Photonics is also contributing to sustainability by improving energy efficiency, reducing waste and enabling real-time environmental monitoring.
Ahead of Electronica 2024, Electronics360 spoke with Alexander Kirst, marketing manager for Hamamatsu, about the current state of the photonics industry.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing the photonics industry today?
The photonics industry faces several significant challenges as it seeks to expand and innovate across applications. Here are some of the most prominent issues:
Manufacturing photonic devices, especially photonic integrated circuits (PICs), requires highly specialized processes and facilities. Unlike electronics, which benefits from established manufacturing infrastructure, photonics production is more complex and lacks standardization, making scaling up production costly and time-consuming.
The photonics industry is highly research-intensive, with substantial investment needed to develop new materials, devices, and applications. This creates barriers for smaller companies and startups, limiting innovation to those with significant funding and increasing the reliance on partnerships with academic and research institutions.
Integrating photonics with existing electronic components presents technical challenges, as the materials and fabrication processes for photonics differ significantly from those used in electronics. Achieving seamless integration while maintaining efficiency, performance, and cost-effectiveness is an ongoing hurdle, particularly in areas like telecommunications and computing.
How can photonics be applied in interdisciplinary fields, such as artificial intelligence or biotechnology?
Photonics, as the science of light generation, manipulation, and detection, plays a pivotal role in advancing biotechnology. This field combines photonics with biological sciences to develop techniques for imaging, detecting and manipulating biological materials. Applications include advanced medical imaging, optical biopsies and minimally invasive surgeries.
In addition, photonics enables the creation of highly sensitive biosensors that detect biological markers, pathogens or chemical substances, facilitating rapid diagnostics and environmental monitoring.
What role does research play in advancing photonic technologies?
Research is fundamental to the advancement of photonic technologies, driving innovation and enabling new applications across various industries. It often translates into commercial products, fostering industry growth.
Key roles of research in this field include:
- Fundamental discoveries: Research uncovers new principles of light-matter interactions, leading to the development of novel photonic materials and devices.
- Technological innovation: Research facilitates the creation of cutting-edge photonic devices, such as integrated photonic circuits (PICs) and silicon photonics, which are crucial for high-capacity data communications.
- Interdisciplinary applications: Research bridges photonics with other fields, leading to advancements like photonic computing processors that utilize light for data processing, offering faster and more energy-efficient alternatives to electronic processors.
What types of photonics customizations are most common?
Most common are custom optics or optoelectronic devices. These can be customized photodiodes, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and other optoelectronic components to meet specific spectral, sensitivity or packaging requirements. Packaging customization is essential for ruggedizing devices for industrial, automotive or medical applications.
In addition, tailoring laser parameters such as wavelength, power and pulse duration is common for applications in materials processing, medical treatment and scientific research.
What emerging trends in photonics do you foresee having the most significant impact in the next five to ten years?
Several emerging trends in photonics are poised to significantly impact various industries over the next five to ten years:
- Integrated photonics: The development of PICs is set to revolutionize data centers, environmental monitoring and medical diagnostics by enabling compact, energy-efficient and high-speed data processing and transmission.
- Silicon photonics: Advancements in silicon photonics are enhancing data communication and telecommunications by integrating photonic functions onto silicon chips, leading to faster and more efficient data transfer.
- Quantum photonics: Progress in quantum photonics is paving the way for quantum computing and secure communication systems, offering unprecedented computational power and security.
In what ways are photonic technologies contributing to more sustainable practices across various industries?
Photonics technologies are playing a vital role in promoting sustainability across various industries by enhancing energy efficiency, reducing waste and enabling more environmentally friendly practices. These applications collectively make photonics a valuable tool for driving sustainability, reducing resource consumption and lowering environmental impact across industries like telecommunications, manufacturing, agriculture and energy.
In addition, photonic sensors provide high-sensitivity environmental monitoring, enabling the detection of pollutants and greenhouse gases in real time. Optical sensing techniques are now widely used for air and water quality monitoring, helping industries track and reduce emissions and pollutants, thereby supporting cleaner, more sustainable operations.
What is your best advice for attendees of Electronica 2024?
As it marks the 60th anniversary of this event, it seems to be the largest event ever – combined with SEMICON event at the same time. So people should have enough time to discover all the showcases and innovations.
