Optics Foundry

Optics Foundry is making optical circuits as easy as electronic circuits.

In electronics the printed circuit board provides a low-cost, high-performance route to market for custom circuit designs. This essential link between breadboards and integrated circuits is missing for optics. The way optical circuits are built hasn’t significantly changed in 50 years. Students, researchers and technicians spend their days making, aligning and then maintaining forests of optics on precision opto-mechanical adjusters in temperature controlled clean rooms. Even fielded products are usually based on breadboards with their inherently high costs, long production times and reliability problems. Solving this problem is essential for fielding most quantum technologies that are built on complex electro-optical systems. More generally, it has great potential for the $40B laser and optical technology market. The ability to rapidly produce custom micro-optical circuits on demand has the potential to disrupt the laser and optics industries providing the manufacturing platform to “open source” optical circuits in much the same way that 3D printing has disrupted manufacturing.

Location: @Science Park