Recognising the value of photonic chips will help enable UK industry to be future-ready

Photonics is essential to modern society - it underpins a vast array of technologies, from global communications to medical devices. The future development of compact, and complex, light-based technologies relies upon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), photonic chips, that incorporate many core components, such as waveguides, amplifiers, detectors, modulators, and sources, onto a chip.

Realising such chips that are based on the flow of light, as opposed to electrons, enables the exploitation of the wide bandwidth and minimal energy loss afforded by photonic technologies. This ensures that photonic chips are both fast at transferring data and highly energy efficient. Importantly, they offer opportunities across a spectrum of deep tech innovation, including, for example, quantum sensing, computing and communication, and AI too.

Given this, the UK must recognise the value of PICs to further drive the realisation of deep tech innovation and equip industry to be future ready.

The drivers of photonic chip adoption

The development of photonic chips has been initially driven by optical communications, to enable compact, high-performance transceivers, with datacom still dominating the current PIC market; the ever-increasing data production and demand for faster networks necessitates new and sustainable solutions. Critically, photonic chips can reduce the need for conversion between optical signals and electrical ones, enhancing, for example, scaling of computing, and thus ultimately supporting the underlying infrastructure that businesses need to improve operational efficiency and long-term commercial success.

The key drivers of photonic chip adoption are the benefits of miniaturisation, scalability, power consumption and lower costs, potentially benefiting businesses operating across a range of sectors. Typically based on silicon and compound semiconductors, integrated photonics can leverage the advanced manufacturing facilities employed by the semiconductor industry. This increases the potential for high volume, low-cost manufacturing, which reduces the barriers to adoption and equip businesses for commercial and efficiency gains in the long-term. At Digital Catapult, we drive the practical application of deep tech innovation to equip the UK to be future ready and recognise areas of deep tech that will be directly enabled by photonic chips, including quantum and AI.

The value of photonic chips in developing other areas of deep tech

Photonics is a key enabler for quantum technologies, underpinning a significant proportion of quantum sensing, computing and communication technologies. Quantum innovation can provide capabilities beyond classical systems for a plethora of applications, and harnessing photonic chips can support many quantum applications, including the potential to develop room-temperature quantum processing and the transmission of quantum information via light travelling in optical fibres and free space. At Digital Catapult, we’re also identifying other commercial applications of quantum innovation, which include driving industrial supply chain resilience and deploying open and future networks across the UK.

Quantum photonic systems may be heavily dependent on bulky components and large optical systems, which potentially hinders their widespread deployment, due to issues with cost, environmental sensitivity and scalability. In this context, integrated quantum photonics help to these resolve challenges by miniaturising optical systems and incorporating them into a chip. This greatly benefits cost, scalability, durability and manufacturability, unlocking new opportunities for leading businesses, and equipping key sectors with the solutions necessary for the future. This is a key reason why the UK must recognise the value of photonic chips to sustain the growth of the sector, as well as other areas of deep tech innovation, including AI.

Accelerating AI advancements with photonics innovation

When it comes to AI, the impact of photonic chips is increasing. At present, research is considering how photonic chips can be employed to enable energy-efficient AI, such as could be applied to a multitude of areas, including natural language processing, autonomous vehicles, and material discovery. Moreover, AI and photonics may become increasingly interdependent in time, with AI enabling the design of photonic components with greater functionality and manufacturability, potentially removing trial and error in design, whilst integrated photonics can provide the vital hardware that underpins AI applications and solutions. Photonic chips could thus act as critical infrastructure that many deep tech AI startups may rely upon to scale successfully. In delivering award-winning AI accelerator programmes at Digital Catapult, we know that access to appropriate resource and infrastructure is critical to startups’ scaling success.

In fact, integrated photonics offers several promising avenues in terms of practical AI applications in industry. The advantages of implementing AI on photonic technologies include high-power efficiency, low energy consumption and low latency, high bandwidths, and potential high-speed parallel processing. For instance, photonic chips could encode information via the intensity or phase of light, with parallel processing via various degrees of freedom, such as multiple wavelengths. Photonic AI accelerators thus could provide a means for businesses and industries to potentially achieve much faster, more efficient data processing, by using light for computation. This will enable next-generation AI-hardware that dramatically improves performance in areas like advanced connectivity, data centres and advanced manufacturing.

Scalability is one of the foremost advantages that considerably impacts all the aforementioned areas of deep tech innovation, potentially unlocking a multitude of new technologies, from miniaturised quantum sensing to neuromorphic computing. Addressing the technical challenges, disaggregation of the national ecosystem and specific infrastructure, will be key the success of UK companies for realising novel technologies that leverage photonic integration.

The potential cross-sector impact of photonic chips, coupled with the UK’s leading photonics and semiconductor research, presents significant opportunities for developing a raft of critical technologies underpinned. This is why the UK must continue to recognise the value of photonic chips to sustain the growth of not only the photonics industry, but also to support the realisation of emerging technologies across multiple sectors.

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Technology and Innovation programme activities

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