A pilot line is basically a small version of high volume production, explains Kevin Williams, full professor at Electrical Engineering, who has played a key role in setting up the project. “You’re checking that every step in production and product development is working, so you can go into volume.” Photonic integrated circuits are widely used in the area of fiber-optic communication, but they have a “mind boggling” diversity in other possible use cases, says Williams. “Like for detecting skin cancer, exchanging quantum-secure information and realtime mapping of traffic for self-driving cars. We also have a research project going on with ASML, where we’re looking at whether we can measure the position of wafers at the picometer scale. There are all sorts of things you can do with light.”

One problem: the costs to develop these chips are high. By standardizing the way of making them and developing a way of production that is almost independent of what the design is, you can share the costs across the industry, Williams explains. “It’s like what you saw with micro-electronics, Philips set up the biggest foundry in the world, in Taiwan, with TSMC. A foundry doesn’t have its own product, but makes chips for everyone else, regardless of the application. We’re copying that model for photonics.”

Different approach

The reason that there will be a facility in Enschede and Eindhoven is that both have a different approach to creating photonic chips. “We work with indium phosphide, they work with silicon nitride. Both have advantages, but there are many situations in which neither of them is enough. For example, the healthcare applications that I mentioned before would benefit from having both together. So the logic is to bring it all together and heterogeneously combine technologies.”

According to Williams,  heterogeneous chips are already being developed at the Nanolab. “That means you basically have multiple chips, and on their own they don’t do very much, but if you can stick them together they are very effective. So we already have some programs on wafer-wafer bonding. The pilot line is really partly about getting these technologies out of the academic lab into industrial fabs.”

Equipment

There are already fabs that can create photonic chips, but they are producing them for very specific applications. It’s very difficult to repurpose these kinds of chips for a completely different application. The power of technologies from Twente University and TU/e is that the development of the chips is designed bottom up, Williams explains, “so they can be used for many different applications.” In addition, TU/e has a track record of setting up pilot lines in photonics. The most recent one was OIP4NWE “In that program we did a lot of equipment optimizations leading to first-of-a-kind tools in the Nanolab now because of that. Also with this new pilot line equipment development is going to be quite an important strategy. It’s not just about making chips work, it’s about configuring the next generation of equipment to make chips.”

The facilities in Eindhoven and Enschede are part of the European pilot line PIXEurope, which is managed by the Institute of Photonic Sciences in the Spanish region Catalonia. Eleven countries are involved in the initiative. With this pilot line they plan to invest 380 million euros in boosting the production and innovation of photonic chips.

In 2023, Queen Máxima visited the Eindhoven Hendrik Casimir Institute to be updated on research in the field of photonics. The main photo of this article is from that visit.