Board-Level Photonics: Embedded Waveguides Solving Photonic Chip Assembly Bottlenecks

The steadily increasing demand in telecoms for higher data bandwidths is driving the integration of optics and photonics technologies in novel datacenter hardware. While many photonic integrated circuit (PIC) platforms have matured over the last decade, giving access to a tremendous improvement in modulation frequencies, data rates, and miniaturized footprints, only a few solutions exist to incorporate PICs together with integrated circuits (ICs) in advanced modules on the board level.

Flöry discusses the principles and use-cases of optical printed circuit boards (PCBs). Through a unique combination of photonic and electrical interconnects, such optical PCBs enable the dense and efficient co-integration of photonic and electrical chips. This renders it an ideal platform for the development of next-generation transceiver modules and promises to fulfill the demands of even more data-hungry applications such as AI.

About the presenter
Nikolaus Flöry, Ph.D., is a business development manager at Vario-Optics, where he works on integrated photonics applications based on the company’s unique polymer waveguide platform. He holds a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in optical sciences, both from ETH Zürich.