Wave Photonics: Shaping the Future of Developing Integrated Photonics

Photonics is a cornerstone of long-distance data communications, providing unmatched speed, large bandwidth, and low energy consumption.

Integrated photonics uses semiconductor processes to miniaturize and mass-manufacture photonic devices with high precision at scale. It has the potential to make them ubiquitous, like electronics, for applications beyond data communications, e.g., optical sensors, optical computing, and quantum technologies.

While the challenge in microelectronics is to lay out billions of transistors on a microchip, integrated photonics typically involves only thousands of components. But unlike transistors, they’re not all the same. Today, designing photonic components is a manual and arduous process that requires great effort from photonic engineers. And every time you change a process or wavelength, you need to adjust the designs of your photonic components manually.

Wave Photonics has automated the process of designing photonic components and built a large library of photonic components that accounts for many different parameters and the tolerances of different foundries. 

Founded by James Lee, Matthew Anderson, and Mateusz Kubica in 2021, it recently raised a €5.3M Seed round from UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund and Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, joined by Redstone QAI Quantum Fund, Kyra Ventures, Parkwalk’s University of Cambridge Enterprise Fund IX, and Deeptech Labs.

Learn more about the future of developing integrated photonics from our interview with the co-founder and CEO, James Lee: 

Why Did You Start Wave Photonics?

I did my PhD in quantum photonics in collaboration with Toshiba’s research lab, so from the start, our focus was broader than just academic research. We always considered how our research would be commercialized. 

After my PhD and a short stint as an equity derivatives quant, I got back into photonics. During my PhD, I had come across some early work on integrated photonics and felt that it would definitely change the whole field. Fast-forward a few years, and to my surprise, nothing had changed. Integrated photonics was still in its infancy, and no solutions were commercially available to develop integrated photonics more straightforwardly. 

We thought integrated photonics was at the start of becoming something big, and that’s an opportunity we wanted to be part of. So, my co-founders and I started Wave Photonics. 

What Is Integrated Photonics?

The semiconductor industry has done a remarkable job of spending trillions on semiconductor processes to mass-produce something as tiny as a transistor, precise down to a nanometer. It has made microchips widely available, and everyone now owns dozens of them—in their phones, cars, or even refrigerators.

Integrated photonics piggybacks on existing semiconductor infrastructure to miniaturize photonics components, integrate them on a silicon chip, and make photonic devices widely available. The jury is still out on whether this works as well as it did in microelectronics, but the preliminary answer is that it can be done and that photonic devices can replace or enhance electronic ones for a wide variety of use cases. It’s not just for data communications but also for many other applications, e.g., in sensing, LiDAR, or optical and quantum computing. 

All of that is driven by the ever-increasing need for more bandwidth, lower latency, and reduced energy consumption—data centers alone produce more carbon emissions than the entire airline industry, so the pain is real, and has become even more acute with the boom in resources needed for AI model training. 

Photons have several nice properties compared to electrons, such as not generating heat via resistance, the possibility of sending different information on each wavelength, or sending beams through the air to measure or sense at a distance. That’s why photonic devices can be much more performant than electronic ones.

How Do You Help Engineers to Develop Integrated Photonics?

We want to make it easier for engineers to develop integrated photonics, especially for applications beyond data and telecommunications—that’s our biggest selling point. We have automated the process of designing new photonic components, i.e., the building blocks for a photonic integrated circuit, and we’re building a library of photonic components suitable for a wide range of applications and fabrication processes. 

Currently, when you’re designing a photonic integrated circuit, you need to employ photonic engineers who design photonic components for your particular application, for the particular wavelength your photonic device is using, and for the particular foundry that is going to manufacture it.

Every foundry manufactures photonic components slightly differently, so you need to characterize the fabrication process and make your designs robust to the variations of the respective foundry. It takes a lot of manual labor, and if you change the parameters of your device or switch to a different foundry, you have to start all over again. 

Some fabs provide process design kits (PDKs) for photonic components, but typically only for telecommunications applications, and they’re so generic you can’t use them out-of-the-box but still need to spend a lot of manual effort to make them work for your designs. Developing all the components you need for your photonics project can be a multi-year, multi-million-dollar effort.

Why Is Developing Integrated Photonics So Different From Microelectronics?

In microelectronics, the building blocks are transistors, and they’re all the same, so you can build larger components straightforwardly by stacking transistors together. The challenge is not so much designing electronic components as to figure out how to arrange billions of transistors on a microchip.

In photonics, you can choose from different materials with different refractive indices to build components that bend light in a way that gives you a desired functionality—such as a lens that can focus or disperse a laser beam. The design of individual components is much more intricate and dependent on the fabrication process, while the layout process for a photonic integrated circuit is comparatively straightforward. 

Photonic components are quite large compared to transistors, on the order of a few to hundreds of microns, so that’s more than three to five orders of magnitude larger. You can’t fit that many on a single chip, typically a couple of thousands or tens of thousands. It is much easier than fitting billions of transistors on a chip. There’s some potential for automation, but the major pain point is in designing photonic components in the first place.

How Did You Evaluate Your Startup Idea?

First, we need to be clear about the gamble we’re taking: integrated photonics will become relevant beyond telecommunications. We’re not excluding telecommunications, but the biggest pain is currently for non-telecommunications applications, and that’s where we think we’ve spotted the biggest opportunity. 

Second, as our component library grows with the number of our customers, we’re building up more and more valuable IPs. This will, importantly, enable us to develop IP for higher-level functions, and that will be unique and a game changer for integrated photonics. Ultimately, we want to enable photonic engineers to make chips with less effort.

It’s like building ARM for integrated photonics. Arm doesn’t license individual components, so the analogy only goes so far. However, after all, we’re also building an increasingly valuable IP portfolio and knowledge about manufacturing for different fabs. 

What Advice Would You Give Fellow Deep Tech Founders?

I was told some of the most surprising lessons I learned throughout my entrepreneurial journey in advance, but I didn’t appreciate them until I experienced them myself. The biggest one, I guess, is that everything takes longer than you think, and, especially as an early-stage startup, you have to be careful with your runway.

While there are many downsides to founding a startup, compared to working in academia or in the R&D lab of a large company, the great upside is that you can set the direction yourself, and you can and should be contrarian. You still need to convince others, like investors and employees, but it allows you to venture off the beaten path and explore something new. 

Want to Learn More?

Many people working in the frontier applications of integrated photonics are designing chips for the first time. 

We want to show how accessible integrated photonics can be, so we offer training in PIC layout and have created free (requires sign-up) tutorials in PIC layout using a great open-source tool, gdsfactory. The tutorials are to take anyone interested in integrated photonics from a beginner to laying out their first chip: https://wavephotonics.com/pdk*


*Sponsored link—we greatly appreciate the support by Wave Photonics

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