Sensores

A material coating, whose light refraction properties can be precisely switched between different states, has been developed by an interdisciplinary research team from the Chemistry and Physics departments at the University of Jena. The team, led by professors Felix Schacher and Isabelle Staude, combined light-reactive polymers with metasurfaces. The work has led to the creation of new optical components that could see use in signal processing.

As light hits this photo-tunable polymer metasurface, properties like its refractive index are changed, depending on the incident light’s wavelength. Courtesy of Jens Meyer/University of Jena. Optical metasurfaces are nanostructured thin layers whose characteristic structural sizes are...

Researchers have developed an all-light communication network that enables seamless connectivity across space, air and underwater environments. The new network design combines different types of light sources to ensure connectivity across environments.

“In today’s world, data transmission is critical for communication, navigation, emergency response, research and commercial activities,” said research team leader Yongjin Wang from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Suzhou Lighting Chip Monolithic Optoelectronics Technology Co. Ltd. “This new wireless network enables uninterrupted connectivity across environments, facilitating two-way real-time data transmission between the network nodes that...

Jenoptik has appointed Jakob Habermann as deputy chairman of its supervisory board, replacing Stefan Schaumburg. Habermann had already been elected to replace Schaumburg in the election of employee representatives to the supervisory board in 2022. Habermann has been a member of the supervisory board since Jan. 1 and holds positions in the investment, personnel, and mediation committees. Habermann currently serves as trade union secretary at the German IG Metall trade union’s central district management, a position he has held since 2014.

Jakob Habermann. Courtesy of Jenoptik. SAN JOSE, Calif. — Optical and photonic products developer Lumentum Holdings has appointed Jae Kim as senior vice president, general counsel, and...

Intel has launched Altera, a standalone field gate array (FPGA) company. Intel acquired Altera, a producer of FPGAs, in 2015. The company has been operating as Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (PSG). Intel had indicated its intent to establish a standalone company for the group in October 2023.

Altera's FPGA AI Suite and OpenVINO platforms utilize AI to generate optimized intellectual property based on standard frameworks like TensorFlow and Pytorch, while its FPGAs are designed to integrate critical AI inferencing capabilities and better intercept evolving standards like PCI Express, CXL, and 6G wireless.

Sandra Rivera, Intel’s executive vice president and CEO of the PSG, also serves as Altera’s CEO. Intel...

America’s enthrallment with corn can crop up in strange ways. Recall the internet-enabled rise to fame of Tariq Day, also known as “The Corn Kid,” in 2022. Day’s love of corn, which, thanks to modern technology, he reiterated time and time again on the screens of our smart devices, granted him luminary status in the world of corn.

There is, perhaps, a rational explanation for this irrational exuberance.

As one of the U.S.’ leading agricultural contributions, corn fields currently occupy 80 million acres, or 3% of the land within our nation’s borders. Domestically, corn growth contributed $164.7 billion to the U.S. economy in 2021. On a global scale, the U.S. accounts for ~30% of the...

The cloud. It evokes an ethereal, weightless environment in which problems get whisked away by a breeze.

In reality, the cloud consists of massive industrial buildings containing millions of dollars’ worth of equipment spread over thousands and, increasingly, millions of square feet. In Arizona, some communities are complaining that cloud data centers are draining their aquifers and consuming far more water than expected. In the U.K. and Ireland, the power requirements of data centers are crimping needed housing development. Even in regions such as northern Virginia where the local economies are tightly bound to data centers, conflicts between residents and the cloud are emerging.

With the rise of AI, these conflicts will...

Microelectronics and sensors, particularly lidar sensors, play a pivotal role in the realm of autonomous driving and self-driving cars. The markets for these technologies exhibit substantial potential, prompting predictions that the automotive lidar market will double in size within the next two years.

Safety is a paramount concern in the automotive sector and is necessitating the deployment of high-value and high-performance lidar systems for advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. The existing challenges to this end revolve around the considerable size, weight, and power consumption of lidar sensor devices. Given these constraints within a vehicle platform, there is a pressing need for further miniaturization of...

Courtesy of Chat GPT4, M. Vera Gonçalves, SOITEC.
During the last decade, the exponential growth of data center traffic has been largely fueled by general-purpose cloud- and internet-based applications, such as video streaming, social networks, internet search engines, and e-commerce platforms. More recently, the onset of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that leverage large language models (LLMs) for both AI training and inference has added significant upside growth perspectives to the traditional data center market. The transformational effect of this market trend can be easily understood when looking at the evolution of LLMs during the last few years. So far, these models exhibit a super-exponential growth...

The use of traditional semiconductor fabrication techniques to create optical components on silicon wafers has opened the door to faster and more efficient solutions for high-speed data communication applications for data centers, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and other applications. Courtesy of Ayar Labs.
Recent advancements in silicon photonics are upending the optical market in the data center, with significant ramifications for how future AI, cloud, and high-performance computing systems will be designed, architected, and deployed. The core problem involves how to best connect compute chips over longer distances while maintaining bandwidth, energy, and density metrics that are acceptable for a given...

Rapid, on-demand access to information is a necessary facet of daily life in the present “age of communications.” The reliable communication links that society necessitates support person-to-person and device-to-device communications at any time and, increasingly, in any place.

Such assurances of connectivity owe to the massive technological strides of the past half century. Now, as with many technology hallmarks of the previous 50 years — spanning hardline telephony to the current ubiquitous smart devices — the pending evolution in the field of communications is poised to require a substantially broadened reach. Networks must extend beyond the existing and forthcoming physical infrastructure of wireline fiber...

To glean insight from the subtle distinctions that differentiate one technology from another is a worthy proposition. The newness of a technology and the need to distinguish between the concepts of its “forecast” and its “roadmap” elaborate such a formidable undertaking.

Though it had not quite yet adopted its status as a bona fide application, silicon photonics arrived in Photonics Spectra in 2005. The article that marked its debut, “The Quest to Siliconize Photonics,” is indicative of the attention that silicon photonics would subsequently garner and receive from this industry for two decades. More recently, owing to a convergence of once parallel advancements in photonics R&D and...

Photoacoustic (PA) technologies offer a noninvasive approach to probing biological tissues, but have seen limited use in clinical applications, partially due to bulky, expensive laser sources. A compact PA sensing instrument for biomedical tissue diagnosis, powered by laser diodes, could provide clinicians with a practical, effective tool for evaluating breast disease.

By providing a cost-effective path to tissue diagnosis, the compact PA sensing instrument could bridge the gap between PA research and its practical application. The instrument is the work of a research team from the Indian Institute of Technology Indore.

The researchers integrated multiple laser diodes for PA excitation within a compact casing and developed a...

Researchers at the Max Born Institute in Berlin have demonstrated attosecond-pump attosecond-probe spectroscopy (APAPS) at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. The advance opens new avenues for the investigation of extremely fast electron dynamics in the attosecond regime.

Current pump-probe setups for the investigation of attosecond phenomena typically pair a weak extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) pulse generated through high harmonic generation with intense NIR pulses in the femtosecond range, with each source contributing limitations.
In the experimental setup, NIR pulses were focused behind a pulsed gas jet, where attosecond pulses are generated. At some distance from the gas jet, spherical half-mirrors were used to spectrally select and focus...

Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have unveiled a novel concept termed supercritical coupling that enables a several-fold increase in photon upconversion efficiency. This discovery not only challenges existing paradigms, but also opens a new direction in the control of light emission, the team said.

Photon upconversion, the process of converting low-energy photons into higher-energy ones, is a crucial technique with broad applications, ranging from super-resolution imaging to advanced photonic devices. Despite considerable progress, the quest for efficient photon upconversion has faced challenges due to inherent limitations in the irradiance of lanthanide-doped nanoparticles and the critical coupling...

Although structured illumination microscopy (SIM) demonstrates ultrahigh temporal and spatial resolution, the speed and intricacy of polarization modulation affect the speed and quality of its imaging resolution in 3D.

A 3DSIM technique, developed by a team led by professor Peng Xi at Peking University, leverages digital display technology to achieve a rapid, reliable, multidimensional SIM imaging tool for investigating diverse biological phenomena. The new microscopy technique blends 3D superresolution and fast temporal resolution with polarization imaging. To do so, it combines the polarization-maintaining and modulation capabilities of a digital micromirror device (DMD) with an electro-optic modulator (EOM).

A DMD uses the...

U.K. Research and Innovation (UKRI) is providing £62 million ($78 million) to support the development of technologies crucial to future telecoms networks such as 6G. Funding will support projects and infrastructure which aim to advance telecom technology.

The Technology Missions Fund (TMF) Future Telecoms Mission will provide sixteen projects with a share of £22 million to support development and commercialization of technology solutions. Projects will be led by academia and industry alike and will work on technologies such as optical network switches, LiFi, mid-infrared free space telecommunications, and optical transceivers.

The remaining £40 million ($50 million) will support three existing future Telecoms...

BAE Systems has been selected by the Space Systems Command (SSC) Space Enterprise Consortium to provide a prototype ground system for the U.S. Space Force’s SSC Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution Command and Control (FORGE C2) project. FORGE C2 will integrate functionality such as telemetry, tracking, command, flight dynamics, mission management, and ground resource management into a consolidated framework that will facilitate the integration of next-generation assets as they come online. BAE Systems was one of four companies chosen to take part in phase one of the project, which was focused on integration and demonstration of prototype capabilities.

TORONTO — Xanadu, a photonic quantum computing company, has...

ams OSRAM is reassessing its microLED strategy following the unexpected cancellation of a cornerstone project for its microLED program, the company said in a press release. Discussions with the related customer are ongoing.

Following the cancellation of the project, the company will revisit the future use of its assets related to its microLED strategy, particularly its 8-inch LED facility in Kulim, Malaysia. The company expects to take a hit to its balance sheet in the ballpark of €600 to €900 million (~$650 to $975 million) in the first quarter of 2024.
ams OSRAM's "Re-Establish-the-Base" business restructuring plan named microLEDs as a core area of focus. The company is now reassessing assets related to this field....

On February 1, the biggest North American photonics convention concluded. It was busier than ever, with over 24,000 registered attendees.

Guests once again enjoyed a great reunion for the photonics family, and, beyond a meet and greet event for the community, Photonics West again featured an overwhelming number of events: conferences with thousands of presentations, short courses, four distinct exhibitions (another record), and many, many parties.

Though it is impossible to cover such a wealth of information, a few points topped my personal Photonics West 2024 agenda.

Secondary Sources

The topic of secondary sources has been around for some time. Now, the engagement of one of the biggest players in the laser...

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) supplier Scintil Photonics has integrated III-V distributed feedback (DFB) lasers and amplifiers with standard silicon photonics technology in production at Tower Semiconductor. The integration technology grants opportunities to accommodate integration of additional materials and functions, including lithium niobate and quantum dots, said Sylvie Menezo, president and CEO of Scintil Photonics.

Scintil unveiled its fully chip-integrated 100-GHz DFB comb laser source offering in March 2023. The company said that its continued partnership with Tower positions it for high volume production to meet market demand.

Scintil’s integrated circuits (ICs) are made using a combination involving...