Profiles of 7 of the leading nanophotonics application developers and summary of the nanophotonics market.
Nananophotonics is the study of the interaction of of light with nanostructured materials, and offers the ability to break through the diffraction limit of light, opening the door to novel optical technologies.. Research in this area has grown greatly in the past 15 years and it has been identified by the European Commission as a key enabling technology for the future. Photonics technologies have already revolutionized communictions and the next wave of nanotech-enabled technologies promises to have the same impact on imaging, sensing and computing. Nanophotonics offers an opportunity to reduce the power and area of off- and on-stack interconnects while meeting future system bandwidth demands. Advances in silicon nanophotonics have made complete photonic on-stack communication networks a serious alternative to electrical networks. Key nanomaterials for nanophotonics are quantum dots and wires in Si, III-V and II-VI; plasmonic nanostructures; high-index-contrast Si and III-V nanostructures; organic nanostructures; carbon nanotubes; and graphene. Applications include plasmosmonic nanostructures for high density (light-assisted) magnetic storgage for increased storage density; nanoscale quantum optics; electrical interconnects; light-emitting diodes and photovoltaics where nanostructuring can be used to optimize the emission or absorption of light; nanoscale imaging; solid-state lighting; medical imaging purposes; light-activated drug delivery; sensors; nanoscale taggants for anti-counterfeiting, food safety tags and medical diagnostics; nanoscale imaging involving probes, optical antennas or super-lens techniques to image beyond the diffraction limit; chemical and biological sensors; telecommunications; and optical communications (switches and amplifiers). All these industries will witness significant growth in the coming years.
Companies investing in nanophotonics technologies include HP, Intel and IBM, with a focus on silicon and carbon-based nanophotonics. Hitachi, NTT and Samsung are developing next generation technologies involving plasmonic data storage, nanoscale integrated optics and colloidal quantum dot displays.
Agilent
www.agilent.com
THE COMPANY
Develops and manufactures high-precision monolithic optical assemblies and components for measurement and evaluation.
TECHNOLOGY
Agilent is developing ultra-high-speed optical components and subsystems for nanophotonics devices. The company has established a chip-scale micro- and nanophotonic- systems testing facility with University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Markets
Fluorescence, microscopy, spectroscopy, aerospace/defense and semiconductor markets.
Hewlett Packard
www.hp.com
THE COMPANY
Hewlett-Packard (HP) is one of the world’s largest hardware and software technology companies.
TECHNOLOGY
HP is developing a raft of nanophotonics devices and products. Chiefly, they are developing nano photonic interconnects to overcome the bottlenecks with existing technology. To investigate the potential benefits of nanophotonics on computer systems they have developed an architectural design called Corona. Corona uses optically connected memories (OCMs) that have been architected for low power and high bandwidth.
Markets
Semiconductors, communications, sensors and information storage.
IBM
www.ibm.com
THE COMPANY
IBM’s nanotechnology research aims to devise new atomic- and molecular-scale structures and devices for enhancing information technologies, as well as discover and understand their scientific foundations. Main research centers are in New York and Zurich.
TECHNOLOGY
IBM has developed CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (CISN) technology for on-chip integration of ultra-compact nanophotonic circuits for manipulating the light signals. Nanoscale silicon photonics circuits are being developed to enable the integration of complete optical systems on a monolithic semiconductor chip that would eventually allow to overcome severe constraints of today’s mostly copper I/O interconnects.
Markets
The technology enables a variety of silicon nanophotonics components, such as: modulators, germanium photodetectors and ultra-compact wavelength-division multiplexers to be integrated with high-performance analog and digital CMOS circuitry.
Luxtera
www.luxtera.com
THE COMPANY
Luxtera was founded in 2001 as a spin off from Caltech. The company builds complex electro-optical systems in mainstream CMOS processes.
TECHNOLOGY
Luxtera has developed CMOS integrated nanophotonics circuits. Silicon-based nanophotonic ICs tremendously increase the integration scale, and the functionality per chip, compared with their counterparts in other material systems (glass, III-V semiconductor, etc.). Luxtera has developed multichannel transceivers, in the process setting up a complete tool chain from CMOS-compatible design libraries all the way to packaging and testing. They integrate photonic circuits with electronics for control, tuning and drivers, and run the processing through a fab from Freescale.
Markets
Silicon Photonics is the driving force that will supports growing bandwidth demands of equipment in high performance computing (HPC), next generation data centers and cloud computing.
Samsung SDI
www.samsung.com
THE COMPANY
SAMSUNG SDI CO., LTD. is a Korea-based company engaged in the manufacture of digital display devices. The Company operates in two business segments: display segment and energy segment.
TECHNOLOGY
Samsung has developed nanoparticle-polymer composites for photonic devices. The company’s Active Matrix OLEDs (AMOLEDs) are based on metal oxide nanoparticles and nanowire transistors and used in smartphones. Their development is also being expanded for use in larger displays and the company has R&D activities in quantum dots for photonics devices.
Markets
Displays, environmental lighting and medical diagnostics.
Intel
www.intel.com
THE COMPANY
Intel Corporation is a multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world’s largest and highest valued semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue.
TECHNOLOGY
Intel has developed the world’s first silicon photonics data link with integrated lasers (utilizing hybrid silicon lasers)-The 50Gbps Silicon Photonics Link. Intel regard their technlogy as superior to IBM’s CMOS nanophotonics innovation. The Hybrid Silicon Laser was developed with the University of California at Santa Barbara. Instead of metal or copper wires, it uses lasers to send light rays across optical fibers, transporting data between two silicon chips at extremely high speeds, across sizeable distances and with relative immunity to noise.
Markets
Ultra-high bandwidth, low cost, optical communications, which will fuel the design and development prospects of data center, business and consumer applications.
Kotura
www.kotura.com
THE COMPANY
Kotura, Inc., founded in 2004, is focused on the application of silicon photonics to solve a range of communications problems. Kotura’s platform technology integrates optics and electronics to refine optical networking.
TECHNOLOGY
Kotura’s photonic product line includes high-speed, single-channel variable optical attenuators (VOAs), high-speed VOA arrays and wavelength-division multiplexers for 40- and 100-Gb/s data center applications to support the interconnect fabric for next generation data centers and high performance computers (HPC). The company’s photonic chips are based on its micron-scale manufacturing platform currently in mass production and deployed in live networks worldwide. Kotura is approaching one million channels per year currently in production.
Markets
Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for the communications, computing, sensing and detection markets.
