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Hi Yuri I thought I'd weigh in on this. Our goal was to try to address some common misconceptions about the field, rather than to push any particular kind of solution. All of the authors on this see the overall success of this field as our goal. Tom, the lead author, and I have been academics for some time, though every author on the article has been involved with at least one silicon photonics commercialization effort. This article is an exercise in saying some moderately heretical things about silicon photonics, to help the community focus on areas and projects that play to the strengths of the technology. I was hoping to convey in the article that the points we're making are the product of pretty broad and diverse experience sets: Tom and I were both founders at Luxtera, and Theirry is still there. Patrick is at IME, which does extensive commercial and pre-commercial work in a variety of fields, including silicon photonics. Dennis is an academic who's spun off several companies, and Steve has been involved with the BAE efforts in silicon photonics and in electronics. So I thought it was kind of surprising that all of these people could be brought together to agree on a set of points about what's going on in the field. I regularly run into people talking about how doing some individual, relatively low-volume device (say a high-performance modulator or a photodetector) is sure be much cheaper because it's in silicon, without having thought about the cost of packaging, yield, mask costs, etc. This is the kind of hype we were trying do dispel with the article. The article was written for a broad audience outside of integrated photonics, most of whom have little or no industrial experience, and aren't used to thinking in terms of system costs, yields, and so forth. Obviously you and the members of this IEEE group have a much more nuanced view of these things. If the only applications that make sense for silicon photonics are ones that require very large volumes, because they require the development of custom processes, it's a big problem for the success of the field. By contrast, if a lot of applications emerge that can be addressed through the use of common processes, as occurred in the electronics industry, then silicon photonics is likely to have a bright future. The high volume applications are important, but for there to be a healthy ecosystem there needs to be a wider swath of opportunities. And it's critical to be able to start a project in the field without budgeting for the cost of full mask sets - this is a big barrier to entry for everyone, from startups to academics to research groups at large semi companies. I agree that if one can use common processes and foundry infrastructure, the up-front costs can be substantially reduced. That's a big piece of the reason that we've been working so hard on making MPW runs available through opsis. And I certainly agree that the cost of the silicon chip itself is rarely going to be the dominant cost in a final product. One of the signs of success for silicon photonics will be a gradual increase in the fractional value of the chip compared to the package. The best path to this outcome is building complex systems-on-chip. I'm glad that the article is provoking some discussion. I'd be very interested to discuss specifics of what assumptions and conclusions you see as being incorrect. I think it could be a jumping off point for a very productive discussion. Highest regards, Michael Hochberg On Apr 19, 2012, at 9:36 PM, Yurii Vlasov wrote:
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