Just two months after being selected to create a $610 million national manufacturing institute, a coalition of photonics researchers is aiming for a Jan. 2 launch date.

The American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics — AIM Photonics for short — already has an 11-member management team in place, and that group is moving rapidly to bring industrial partners into the fold and chart a course for the organization.

Integrated photonics devices, particularly those based on silicon, are expected to be crucial to communications and other technologies in the very near future. Until now, photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have been developed by several groups working separately, meaning there is no standard for assembly or packaging.

Creating that standard and finding ways to drive down manufacturing costs will be a primary goal of AIM Photonics. Today, as optical communications technologies reach for ever-higher data transmission rates, the advantages of a unified approach to fabrication and quality testing are clear, according to AIM Photonics CEO Michael Liehr.

"The timing for this thing is just right," he said in a recent phone interview with Photonics Media.

READ MORE