Shifts in microchip-making to aid automotive, medical

Does it sound like a big deal to integrate lasers onto photonic integrated circuits (PICs)? What about using silicon to make PICs? And what about co-packaging optics with electronics? Each of these moves is big. AIM Photonics is figuring prominently in all three dramatic shifts in the making of microchips. And the upshot, according to John Bowers, the institute’s acting CEO, is the U.S. is winning a global battle for domination in integrated photonics. Importantly, manufacturers embracing artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) will benefit greatly, he said. “The chips that Intel and Broadcom announced recently are 25-terabyte/second chips, so that’s … 25 million megabytes/second,” Bowers said. “That’s how much data each of them processes. It lets your networks just keep getting faster and more complex, so they can handle more data.”