Photonic Systems
PIC platforms, light sources, displays, modulators, metasurfaces, photonic compute. Light as the carrier — increasingly the cheapest way to move and process information.
PIC platforms
Silicon photonics, InP, GaAs, polymer photonics, photonic ICs, heterogeneous integration. The substrates competing to be the equivalent of CMOS for light.
Light sources
DFB/DBR lasers, quantum cascade lasers, VCSELs, single-photon sources, frequency combs. How photons get created — across visible, IR, and increasingly mid-IR.
Displays
Micro-LED, OLED, holographic and volumetric displays. Light emission as the output modality — the layer between digital state and the human eye.
Modulators & detectors
Mach-Zehnder modulators, electro-absorption modulators, Pockels modulators, ring resonators, spatial light modulators, avalanche and Ge/InGaAs photodiodes. How photons get manipulated and counted.
Photonic compute
Optical neural networks, diffractive deep neural networks, photonic tensor cores, photonic compute-memory. Doing the multiply-accumulate in light — if it scales, the AI accelerator wars get a new entrant.
Metasurfaces
Metalens, metasurfaces / flat optics, metamaterials, wafer-level optics. Sub-wavelength nanostructured surfaces that replace whole lens stacks with a single layer — the cheapest path to high-volume optics.