Company

History

BB Photonics is built upon a 20-year period of dutch academic research, where optical building blocks were developed and proof-of-concept devices were demonstrated. BB Photonics also follows a 5-year period of European effort to establish an InP-based technology platform, that allow us to design various ASPICs in one generic technology.

Future

Innovation is the key to growth, competitiveness and thus economic and social well-being in the 21st century. One of the pivotal areas of innovation has been integrated circuits in electronics based on Silicon technology. It brought the world everything between powerful computers and MP3 players. Presently, we are at the doorstep of a comparable innovation boost, however, this time around based on photonic integrated circuits.

The field of photonics already changed the way we work and spent out spare time by delivering the high capacity information carrying backbone of the Internet. Now photonics is on the edge of maturing from single components like a laser or an optical switch into advanced circuits on single chip. These integrated circuits will enable diverse new applications in fields like diagnostics for health care, advanced fiber sensing systems that change the way our infrastructure is monitored, and virtually unlimited bandwidth to the home, to name a few.

InP-based photonic technology is the clear enabler of the next generation photonics - all of the required optical functions can be created on an Indium Phosphide (InP) material based chip. However, the cost of entry into the field of photonic chips is (too) high due to capital investments in equipment, cleanrooms, knowledge, process development and operational cost of such a set-up. The new EU-funded project EuroPIC (started August 2009) is starting to change the dynamics of the InP photonic chips development by collaboration of research institutes, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and industry partners.

EuroPIC aims to develop and demonstrate a completely new business model for InP photonics; a continuous industrial process for the realization of optical chip from concept to a tested device. A customer will see only one counter behind which the complexity of the technology is hiding. EuroPIC provides European companies and institutes the required production methods and tools. EuroPIC will bring the application of photonic integrated micro-systems in advanced products within reach for a broad class of SMEs by reducing their required investment costs by more than an order of magnitude.

This will be done by developing a knowledge-based technology platform for production of Application-Specific Photonic Integrated Circuits (ASPICs) that will combine an increase in flexibility with a dramatic reduction of cost. It will lay the foundation for a breakthrough of ASPICs in a wide range of applications. With this aim, a consortium consisting of Europe's leading ASPIC manufacturers, photonic CAD companies and InP-semiconductor research laboratories have joined forces with a number of pilot customers, both SMEs and larger companies.

The fundamental concept within EuroPIC is that of the generic process in a horizontally integrated business model as applied to InP-based ASPICs. This is a radical departure from current practice. Firstly, a generic process by definition is application-blind in that it should be capable of producing any circuit design by using standard components with well defined design specification boundaries. In such a generic process there would no longer be the requirement for technologists to hand-craft processes to deliver ASPICs to a specific design. This still is the normal practice in the research literature (and indeed in industrial R&D) today, and which inevitably leads towards high production costs. A true generic process for InP ASPICs does not currently exist anywhere in the world.

Secondly, instead of having all knowledge in a single company, EuroPIC aims for a horizontally integrated businesses model; software houses, circuit design houses, packaging, and foundries all exist as separate enterprises, which opens the market for competitors in any of the specific field to make the technology a success as a whole.

Within this larger context, BB Photonics is having the role of a design house for InP-based ASPICs. It uses the EuroPIC technology platform to develop itself as a fab-less provider of integrated optical chips to customers. Next to and beyond EuroPIC, target customers of BB Photonics are businesses or universities having a need for the known-how of optical integrated circuit design.