Photonic IC are Likely to Continue Displacing Traditional Ics in a Range of Applications

Photonic IC

A microchip with two or more photonic components that work together to form a circuit is called a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) or an integrated optical circuit. This innovation processes, creates, transports, and detects light. Electronic integrated circuits use electrons, whereas photonic integrated circuits make use of photons (or light particles). A photonic integrated circuit performs operations for information signals imposed on optical wavelengths, often in the visible spectrum or near infrared, which is the main distinction between the two (850–1650 nm).

When compared to optical components, integrated optics has several advantages, including a significantly smaller size due to the footprint of an optical waveguide, more reliable optical alignment carried out during fabrication, and lower cost made possible by massive parallelism in planar processing.

The global Photonic IC Market was valued at US$ 996.1 Mn in 2019 and is forecast to reach a value of US$ 17,075.6 Mn by 2027 at a CAGR of 42.6% between 2020 and 2027.

Photonic IC is still a new technology in development. Almost entirely PIC-based full photonic systems with the complexity and infrastructure levels available in electrical devices like computers have not yet been realised. However, rather than being used in a solely photonic system, certain photonic-based systems are already complementing or replacing components in larger electronic systems to boost efficiency. This is comparable to how, in the second part of the 20th century, digital systems started to replace older analogue components like thermometers and rotary phones before developing into larger, more complicated systems.

 High-speed data is transmitted over fibre optic waveguides in the telecommunications sector as an illustration of this trend. Since common data networks and power infrastructures are based on electrical, rather than photonic, architecture, information must ultimately be transformed into digital signals before being processed by common electronic equipment. PICs will probably keep displacing traditional ICs in a variety of applications since optical systems utilise less power than electrical systems do. It is difficult to combine photonics and electronics in a chip. The photonics die and electronics die are currently typically produced independently and then connected together in a photonics system. The packaging is more complicated because the dies are stacked in a package. The curved optical fibres make it difficult to test the PIC.