Let There Be Light

The beauty of manufacturing with photonics

Harnessing all the power the sun provides remains elusive to us here on Earth, but that hasn’t stopped us from doing some incredible things with light. The use of photonics in manufacturing – generating, manipulating, and detecting light – allows us to make semiconductors powerful enough to run advanced electronics. With that power of light, manufacturing is also safer and more productive, with workflows optimized by lidar sensors and cobots working with lidar vision. Every step of the way photonics illuminates manufacturing efforts, and we’re just beginning to realize what it’s capable of.

Lighting Up Our Lives

To get a good picture of how ubiquitous photonics is becoming, you only need to take a look at your smartphone’s screen. It’s durable and scratch-resistant. It lights up with varying levels of brightness, allowing you peruse the internet or your photo album in nearly any situation. Laser writing applies waveguides in a matter of seconds that can’t be seen with the naked eye but make all those qualities possible.

Or take your car. Depending on how recently it was made, it might feature interactive touchscreen displays on the interior. On the exterior, it might have driver assist capabilities and object detection alerts that increase safety.

Less often seen but no less important, some lasers possess the right efficiency and wavelength range to enhance medical diagnostics. The level of precision some lasers provide makes them effective in medical instruments, and the sensory and imaging applications make photonics a vital part of medical devices.

The high-resolution projection photonics can provide makes AR headsets and high-def holographs possible. And when it comes to making the chips that power all these devices, silicon photonics is up to the challenge.

“Integrating light onto a chip creates a challenge,” Vik Chaudhry, senior director of product marketing and business development at Amkor, told Semiconductor Engineering. “You have to generate a laser, and you have to have optical alignment, and that’s a totally different beast for manufacturing.”

Today’s photonics in manufacturing can handle it, though, working with curvilinear masks to direct light in subtle curves, even when it’s determined to go in a straight line, making for denser and more complex products.

The Light We Cannot See

When products roll off the assembly line, photonics helps with quality control, checking for faults human eyes couldn’t detect to ensure that what ends up in the end user’s hands works properly. Hyperspectral imaging can analyze construction materials for cracks or other faults and check for impurities in pharmaceuticals before they ship out to be consumed by sick people.

It’s even effective on biological products. Such imaging can detect whether crops are diseased, making it invaluable in agricultural settings, and it can inspect fruits and vegetables for quality before they ship.

“When fruits travel down the conveyor belt, they can be scanned using InGaAs and CMOS cameras. The InGaAs camera will show defects beginning to form under the skin that a human eye cannot see (using infrared technology) while the CMOS camera will show visible defects. All defects detected will help filter out produce that should not reach the store,” photonics manufacturing giant Hamamatsu says.

Light That Connects

Nothing in the universe travels faster than light. So when it comes to building out global (and beyond) communications networks, photonics plays a key role there too. Fiber-optic networks powered by photonics deliver information at high speeds over long distances. This make real-time, encrypted communication possible over vast distances, imperative for further space exploration.

Here on Earth, photonics can handle the ever-accelerating demand for data at a lower energy cost and making data centers more efficient. By using photons instead of electrons to conduct data, photonics can send messages faster than electrical wiring without generating the heat that electricity does.

“Companies are reaching limitations in terms of how much bandwidth they can carry through the substrates,” Yin Chang, senior vice president of sales and marketing for ASE, told Semiconductor Engineering. “If you’re not able to meet those requirements, then photonics is the only option.”

With the prevalence of AI, this ability to process data faster will be of great significance. Manufacturing with AI-driven photonics can reduce waste and speed up production because lasers won’t be thrown off by changes in texture, shape, and thickness of materials.

“These investments demonstrate that integrating AI into the digital infrastructure is inevitable. This situation presents an opportunity to supply photonic instruments that will speed up digital data management and communication, which will accelerate the creation of chips together with an error-free supply chain,” said Altechna CEO Antanas Laurutis.

As we further harness the power of photonics in manufacturing, we’ll discover how to build the future.