Tech companies should keep a close an eye on photonics
Dan Holladay of BRIDG to speak at Photonics Integration Conference in Eindhoven
On the 26th of September Dan Holladay, executive director of operations and technology programs at BRIDG, will speak at the Photonics Integration Conference at High Tech Campus Eindhoven about how innovation platforms can help scale up manufacturing in photonics.
BRIDG is an open innovation platform for the semiconductor industry based in the US. Last year, Holladay signed a partnership with PhotonDelta in Eindhoven to exchange knowledge, skills and talent in photonics and semiconductor technology.
In a recent interview with the Photonics Integration Conference organisers, Holladay said he was amazed about how little company CEOs still understood about photonics. "We're still in that phase of educating. But if companies get on board now they will have a competitive advantage in the future," he commented. "That's what public-private collaboration is all about, building the right platforms and infrastructures that enable the companies that participate to have a competitive advantage."
Holladay says that even the Googles and Facebooks of the world may not be aware of photonics' potential."They want others to develop things and bring it to them, so they can implement it. "˜Tell me when I can test it and I'll put it into production.' But are they down in the lab, understanding exactly where they need to be pushing? No."
But he thinks they should be. "I've learned this from the US government contractors like the Lockheed Martins of the world. In the past they were system integrators. They only bought what was on the shelf, and integrated that into their technologies. But now they're realizing that they can't just wait for their supply chain to evolve. They know they need to better understand technologies and drive their supply chain to deliver them these technologies first."
Holladay has great hope for photonics to bring the world into the "˜terabit era' when sensors will be infinitely cheaper and higher resolution than they are now. "Think Star Trek or the Jetsons," he says. "It's going to be real science fiction."
He believes photonics will have an early impact on aerospace and defence but that robotics and autonomous systems are also critical. "For robotics to really become more widely introduced, they need better sensors and armatures. And I'm really passionate about health care. There are so many opportunities in the imaging world to better detect and treat cancers, to spot diseases earlier, to do robotic surgeries, you name it," he said
The main challenges that still need to be overcome include being able to improve the imaging systems."The resolution of imagers is about 25 percent of the human eye. That needs to be improved tremendously. Packaging "“ making and integrating lasers into an integrated circuit "“ is another major problem. It amounts to more than half the cost and it's still very slow."
