In 2019, Kevin McComber '05, PhD '11 was at MIT working on integrated photonics ' chip-based devices that send and receive signals using light ' and set out to hire someone to design photonic chips. The experience made him realize just how little expertise the U.S. workforce has in integrated photonics design, a problem that's part of a broader shortage of workers in semiconductor manufacturing. Despite having no background in photonics design at the time, McComber decided to leave MIT and start a photonics design services company called Spark Photonics. To directly address the talent shortage he witnessed, McComber and his co-founder, Al Kapoor, launched the Spark Photonics Foundation, a nonprofit that teaches K-12 and college students about concepts in STEM and advanced manufacturing, using semiconductors and photonics technologies. 'The Foundation came from recognizing the need for workers and thinking long-term about what makes the most sense, not just for us but for the country, to address the gap in photonics and in semiconductor manufacturing more broadly,' McComber says....

Photonics ' the science of guiding and manipulating light ' enables applications ranging from telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing to medical imaging, lidar, and augmented reality displays. But despite the importance of this growing field, the nation faces a shortage of photonics and electronics technicians and engineers. The Lab for Education and Application Prototypes (LEAP), located on the fifth floor of MIT.nano, is a research laboratory that also functions as a hands-on classroom for learning how to package electronic and photonic chips. This open-access facility was the first in what is now a network of five labs supporting innovation in advanced manufacturing across Massachusetts. The MIT LEAP is outfitted with tools for electronic-photonic packaging including a die bonder, wire bonders, an X-ray inspection system, a large area microscope, a plasma treatment machine, and a reflow oven for soldering applications ' but it's not just about the tools, says Anu Agarwal, principal research scientist in the Materials Research Laboratory and leader of the LEAP at MIT....

Luminar, a company that builds vision-based lidar and machine perception technologies for autonomous vehicles, is acquiring high-performance laser manufacturer Freedom Photonics on Monday. The all-stock transaction involves Luminar selling 3 million shares of its common stock, or about $42.3 million at today's share price, per a regulatory filing. 'The deal is signed and expected to close in the second quarter, and it really brings Freedom Photonics's high-powered laser and their related photonic integrated circuit technologies to optimize the performance, as well as advance our cost roadmap, of our future sensors,' Jason Eichenholz, Luminar's co-founder and chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. Whether on city streets or highways, a major problem autonomous vehicle systems face is the ability to see and recognize objects at far distances. In order to get the point density and resolution needed to allow the AV system to determine whether it sees a tire or a person 300 meters ahead on the road, a high-powered laser pulse and high-quality beams are critical, two components that Freedom Photonics excel at, according to Eichenholz....

Throughout her talk, presented on Nov. 15 in a hybrid format to more than 500 attendees, the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership at Stanford’s School of Engineering offered multiple examples arguing that, yes, computer software can help identify better solutions than traditional methods, leading to smaller, more efficient devices, as well as entirely new functionalities. Photonics, the science of guiding and manipulating light, is used in many applications such as optical interconnects, optical computing platforms for AI or quantum computing, augmented reality glasses, biosensors, medical imaging systems, and sensors in autonomous vehicles. For all these applications, Vuckovic said, many optical components must be integrated on a chip that can fit into the footprint of your glasses or mobile device. Unfortunately, the problems with high-density photonic integration are several. Traditional photonic components are large, sensitive to fabrication errors and environmental factors such as variations in temperature, and are designed by manual tuning with few parameters. So, Vuckovic and her team asked, “How can we design better photonics?”...