Photonect is developing a laser adhesion technique to attach optical fibers to photonic chips, which are crucial for data centers to process and transmit data. This technique is 10X faster and 4X more efficient than conventional glue methods and can reduce the cost of attachment by 50 percent.
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Juniyali Nauriyal
Juniyali Nauriyal is co-founder and CEO of Photonect Interconnect Solutions. Previously, she was a Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester, where she worked on developing a novel technique to connect optical fibers to photonic chips using laser adhesion—one of the biggest challenges in the industry, as 80 percent of a device's cost is in packaging and testing. She received her master’s degree from the University of Rochester.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Almost all our data communication needs are met through data centers, which are the largest global consumers of electricity and power. Integrated photonic devices help reduce power consumption and increase data transmission efficiency, but represent half of the total device cost and result in half of the signal being lost at each connection point in the approximately 270,000,000 connections in data centers in the United States. There is therefore a critical need to reduce cost and power consumption by improving integrated photonic device performance.
Technology Vision
Fiber-to-chip attach solutions can take 10 minutes per connection, significantly increasing costs. Photonect Interconnect Solutions’ laser-based attach technology takes less than a minute to connect, increasing the yields by 10X and reducing the costs by half. Photonect Interconnect Solutions’ novel chip design including a mode converter improves device performance by 4X—directly impacting the energy consumption of a data center.
Potential for Impact
Photonect Interconnect Solutions’ technology has a direct impact on the power consumption of a data center by decreasing the signal lost at each photonic device connection. With laser-based attach technology, the cost of optical fiber-to-chip attachment is reduced by half, facilitating entry into mass-production consumer markets. Using integrated photonic chips in consumer electronics will enable faster devices that consume less power.