AIM Photonics Featured in LaserFocusWorld, “Industrializing photonics”
While photonic integration is on point with sensors and LiDAR, challenges remain in fully adapting other emerging technologies such as metalenses and metasurfaces into the planar world of today’s integrated photonics.
AIM Photonics goals
The centerpiece of AIM Photonics is a billion-dollar semiconductor fabrication foundry that does “much more than just photonics,” says Thomas Brown, a professor at the University of Rochester and a leader in developing the group’s test, assembly, and packaging program. Based at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly; Albany, NY) and funded by New York State, the foundry was already being used by SUNY Poly strategic partners on semiconductor electronics when planning began for AIM Photonics. It boasts a full suite of 300 and 200-millimeter chip fabrication. Federal agencies and industrial partners also provide funding for AIM Photonics.
“They have the cutting-edge foundry fab tools to do everything needed for photonics, with much more repetition and replicability than in a smaller foundry. And it was built to do 300 mm wafers, which gives you a lot more chips per wafer” and drives down costs (see Figs. 1 and 2), Brown says, noting that developing an optical version of the foundry will come alongside the electronics ones, but not replace them. Optics are superb for long-distance transmission of large volumes of data and are vital for quantum communications, but are much better processing information.