![]() OCT is the optical equivalent of ultrasound, but it can do 3D visualization of tissue at the cell level and even look at the metabolism within the cells. You can build an optical coherence tomography (OCT) sensor system. When you can provide the full functionality in a single circuit and develop that at a price level that complies with what the automotive industry needs, then basically you are in business. LIDAR is extremely important for autonomous cars in the automotive industry. What can you do with a photonic circuit that you can’t with microelectronics? So you can go to much higher frequencies and you can do that far more energy efficiently. The other advantage is that when you look at the frequencies you can cover with photons, they are a factor of about 1,000 – 10,000 higher than the spectrum you can cover with electrons. When you do this for photon-based technologies, the energy budget is less than a femtojoule per bit – so a factor of a thousand less energy demand. Looking at the energy efficiency of the most advanced microelectronics chip, processing a bit of data consumes roughly a picojoule. And this means that we need to do something different very rapidly. Microelectronics is a limiting factor if we want to grow traffic at the same rate it has been growing for the past 20 years. Also, with the Internet of Things, Netflix, Facebook, YouTube and other Internet activities, data centers are growing capacity by a factor of 2 per year. In 2016, 5% of all electrical power generated was used for processing data in data centers and telecommunications centers – and that’s growing by a factor of about 1.7 per year. ![]() The problem we are facing is that the handling and processing of data, which we do in data centers, is still done by microelectronics, and microelectronics is not very energy efficient. Why do we need an alternative to electronics? In photonics devices, instead of using electrons as the information carriers, you use photons, which are packages of light energy. Photonics is similar to microelectronics. Ton Backx: What you are most likely familiar with are microelectronics and microelectronic circuits, out of which your computer systems are built – basically any product that you buy these days makes use of these microelectronic circuits. And he is putting in place the fundamental research, technology and infrastructure needed to do so. Ton Backx – serial entrepreneur and CEO of both the Institute for Photonic Integration and Photon Delta at Eindhoven University of Technology – believes we are now on the cusp of ushering in this new photonic era. Yet for the most part the dream of light-based chips has yet to make it out of the lab. Photonics has long been heralded as the next big thing in computing, a technology for the 21st century in which photons replace electrons to offer light-speed super energy-efficient data processing and myriad new devices that benefit society.
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