Ebook: Chip-Scale Programmable Photonic Filters

The photonics industry today is at a technically exciting and economically important juncture: The transition from discrete components to early, modest levels of integration. There are early indications of commercial promise for integrated photonics, including dedicated start-ups such as Infinera and Luxtera, and active development groups at large companies such as Intel. The current literature and prevailing views accept most of the basic lessons gleaned from the history of the electronic integrated circuit: the need for an integrated manufacturing platform, the value of chip real estate and overall yield. The role of gain is also well appreciated, especially in driving towards a scalable architecture. But gain also enables programmability, and therefore unlocks huge economic advantages of scale and scope. For example, the power to program microprocessors, DSPs, and FPGAs, allows the development and manufacturing costs of these devices to be amortized over a large number of "niche" applications with medium or small market sizes. The profitable "market of one" is achieved routinely by programmed microprocessors, digital signal processors (DSPs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Since the same integrated circuit design may be used in a tremendous number of applications, the fixed costs of design, development and wafer fab can be amortized across disparate small markets. Further, it is quite common to re-program any of these integrated circuits remotely to improve performance or adapt their mission. Read more...