Designing the Next Generation of Photonic-Enabled Systems

Designing the next generation of photonic-enabled systems increasingly requires system-level engineering. Rather than focusing solely on what photonic chips can do, progress now depends on how photonic technologies, applications, and system architectures are co-developed to realise their full potential. In response, PhotonDelta is hosting a focused engineering challenge that invites the photonics community to rethink how photonic-enabled systems are designed and applied. 

Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) are now offering capabilities that would have been unfeasible to implement with traditional electronics integrated circuits (ICs) alone. Now, the emphasis is shifting from designing, fabricating, and manufacturing photonics to developing systems that leverage the technology. 

Yet in many cases, the applications built on top of these technologies don’t fully utilise their true potential. Solutions today mostly see photonics as a replacement for electronic components rather than treating them as a complimentary technology to enable performance enhancements.

While this shift in thinking has begun within the engineering community, it is not yet reflected consistently at the application level. Fully realising the benefits of photonic-enabled systems requires a change in how applications are conceived from the outset. 

To address this gap in practice, PhotonDelta is launching an engineering contest that invites startups, university teams, corporations and research institutions, and the entire photonics community to tackle open, real-world problems across four key domains, including:

• Communication and computing

• Imaging

• Wireless

• Sensing

Communications and Computing

Communication and computing systems were the earliest adopters of PICs. The adoption was driven by the constant need to move large volumes of data across the physical infrastructure. Telecommunications networks rely on optical fibres carrying laser light as the backbone for long-haul and access connectivity, where capacity limits are becoming increasingly pronounced. Our connectivity demands will keep growing, and unless we achieve radical innovation in our physical network infrastructure, networks themselves will be unable to grow accordingly.

PICs can help address bandwidth issues by extending the operating wavelength for telecommunications and achieving high-speed data transmission. But the most significant advantage of implementing PIC technology in telecommunications is that it encourages photon-based communication, allowing for smooth implementation with the current fibre-based technologies. 

With the help of Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM), multiple streams of information can be encoded and manipulated by using different degrees of freedom of photons, such as wavelength, polarisation, and phase. By exploiting these independent degrees of freedom, PIC-based systems can transmit significantly larger amounts of data in parallel over a single physical channel. 

While long-haul telecommunications are constrained by capacity and reach, data communication systems face a different set of challenges, namely bandwidth density, power consumption, and latency at short reach. As data volumes continue to grow multifold, the architectural gains are no longer just about performance; they directly affect the energy consumption and sustainability of the overall system.

The recent surge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has caused unprecedented strain on the environment, with data centres demanding large amounts of energy and water to keep them cool. If the current trends continue, by 2027, AI will cause a sixfold increase in global water usage, from 1.1bn to 6.6bn cubic metres. This is equivalent to more than half of the UK’s total water usage.

Compared to conventional electronics, photonics generates a lot less heat, and by switching to systems that do not rely on the use of electronic interconnects, energy consumption can be decreased.  Electrical interconnects typically consume on the order of tens of picojoules per bit, while photonic interconnects can operate at only a few picojoules per bit, particularly at higher data rates and longer distances. By reducing the reliance on electrical data movement, PICs become much more energy-efficient, helping reduce the overall electricity consumption.

By keeping photonic innovation in mind, system architectures can be designed and fabricated for computing and communication technologies to build a future of reliable, high-speed data transmission and processing.

Imaging

Imaging technologies enable us to observe the world in ways that go far beyond the limits of human vision.  We can study the underlying mechanisms of biological samples, see through our skin into our bodies and can even produce 3D-images of the environment around us.

As imaging technologies continue to play a pivotal role in medical diagnostics, the demand for high-speed, high-resolution, energy-efficient 3D imaging will grow. But currently, conventional technologies are bulky, expensive, and power-hungry systems, all characteristics that PICs could help improve. However, despite the potential to enhance current technologies, PICs haven't seen much commercial or industrial implementation apart from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) for autonomous driving.

Imaging systems consist of bulky components such as lenses, collimators, spatial light modulators and filters. By shrinking them down and manufacturing them on a photonic chip, performance is increased while at the same time using a scalable semiconductor process, allowing better cost control. Similar to telecommunications technologies, imaging applications can benefit greatly from the waveguide nature of PICs, since photons can propagate from one component to the next without the need for careful and precise alignment and the presence of mechanical parts to hold the optics in place. Instead, photons can be guided through the system, as the waveguide can be bent at any arbitrary angle.

Being able to manipulate light at the sub-micron scale makes PICs a powerful platform to perform measurements that usually require multiple moving parts.

Regardless of all these advantages, integrated photonics is still not widely used in imaging systems. The next generation of imaging systems needs to consider a design that scales beyond niche applications.

Wireless

As the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and AI grow exponentially every year, their requirements and demands do too. For networks to be developed further into the 6G mobile communications technology, higher data rates, lower latency and greater energy efficiency need to be achieved. 

Researchers explore the idea of integrating 6G with satellites, Wi-Fi and AI to help manage networks and services. For this to become true, new frequency bands need to become available, with systems operating at Q, V and W bands. PICs can be a platform to operate these systems, offering advantages over conventional electronics and Radio Frequency (RF) solutions, which have bandwidth bottlenecks, can heat up during operation and can show a reduced efficiency in their energy usage. 

Integrated photonics, with the implementation of optical components onto single chips, can transfer data at high speed, low latency and high energy efficiency.

Telecommunications industry has already been using PICs in their systems, using Silicon Photonics (SiPh) as their base platform and adding other material systems like InP, SiN or TFLN with heterogeneous integration technologies. 

Sensing

Despite significant progress, current sensing technologies face several challenges when applied to biomedical, agricultural, and environmental monitoring. Biomedical sensing devices must be sensitive enough to detect various biomarkers in biological media, yet they face challenges in making them compact and user-friendly. In the case of agriculture and environmental monitoring, problems such as power consumption and wireless connectivity can hinder our ability to make scalable networks in remote settings.

Integrated photonics could play a pivotal role in advancing sensing for these applications. With their compact architecture, PICs can be sensitive sensors for detecting changes in temperature, pressure and chemical composition. Point of care (PoC) practices, where patients are diagnosed on the spot instead of sending samples to the laboratory, are now in development and play a significant part in shaping the diagnostics of the future. These technologies are usually integrated with AI technology that require vast and complex data, and PICs can help develop systems that are sensitive, fast and accurate.

Technologies that use light to identify irregularities in tissue, blood flow or brain activity are advancing rapidly. Usually, these devices send a specific spectrum of light into the sample under study, and by investigating how the light waves interact with and return from the sample, physiological, structural, or functional information can be extracted. This enables applications ranging from disease detection and functional assessment to continuous monitoring and response tracking over time.

All this can be done with a single PIC, where both the photon source and the sensor can be included on the same chip. With the recent shift from hospital-centred care toward home-based diagnostics and monitoring, PICs can support the development of user-friendly devices that can save resources and encourage a patient-centred model.

Given the exceptional sensitivity of photonic sensors and the ability of wave-optical phenomena to encode complex information, future technologies must leverage these properties to meet increasing sensing and information-processing demands. Moving ahead, sensing modalities based on photonic architectures are expected to play a critical role in achieving highly efficient, sensitive, and scalable sensing solutions.

What Comes Next

Addressing the system-level challenges outlined in this article requires focused experimentation, new architectural thinking, and real-world validation. As the photonics technologies mature, the focus must increasingly shift towards designing systems and applications that can fully utilise the benefits offered by the cutting-edge technology. 

To drive this next phase forward, PhotonDelta, together with Wevolver, is organising an engineering challenge, focused on turning photonic-enabled capabilities into deployable applications. The challenge will center on real-world problems across communication and computing, imaging, wireless, and sensing technologies, with an emphasis on system-level design choices and deployability. 

Read more and register your application today to join the challenge to unlock innovative and groundbreaking applications of photonic chips:

TO THE CHALLENGE