The platform to unleash the transformative potential of integrated photonics

A new computational design platform lets engineers create integrated photonic chips from pre-built, adaptable components instead of designing everything from scratch. Integrated photonics—the technology that routes light through microscopic circuits on chips—is currently too expensive and slow to bring to market. Each new product requires months of custom design and costly fabrication runs. The platform, called Wave Photonics, solves this by combining a new way to model how a fabrication process actually behaves with a computational optimisation method that works across multiple materials and wavelengths. This allows designers to adapt components to new wavelengths or materials without starting over. If successful, the platform could slash the engineering cost and timescale for bringing photonic products to market. That matters because integrated photonics underpins faster data communications, more sensitive medical diagnostics, and more efficient lidar for autonomous vehicles—systems that currently rely on expensive, bespoke optics. By making photonic chip design as modular and automated as electronic chip design, the platform could accelerate deployment across telecommunications, sensing, and computing infrastructure.