IIT Madras Starts Silicon Photonics Research Centre of Excellence

Silicon Photonics is vital for many advanced technologies including 5G & future networks, Quantum Computation, Quantum Key Distribution, Neural Networks & Artificial Intelligence, among others

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary S. Krishnan today launched a state-of-the-art Silicon Photonics Research Centre of Excellence at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras).

Within the next five years, the Silicon Photonics Centre of Excellence, Centre for Programmable Photonic Integrated Circuits and Systems (Silicon Photonics CoE-CPPICS) is targeting achieving self-sufficiency and driving product commercialization through start-ups.

Besides, high-speed transceiver for data centres, Silicon Photonics Technology is vital for many other advanced technology applications such as Quantum Computation, Quantum Key Distribution, Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence as well as 5G/6G and future networks.

This Silicon Photonics CoE-CPPICS is all set to play a major role in upcoming years to reduce existing gaps in the country and fulfil the ambitious objectives of India Semiconductor Mission of the Government of India.

This Centre, established with MeitY funding support, will provide essential training to bolster the future ecosystem of Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) manufacturing in India. The CPPICS is actively developing indigenous PIC design rules and hardware infrastructure for precision packaging for system-level applications.

The immediate focus of this CoE is to provide better solutions for microwave and quantum photonics applications such as advanced photonic processors to be used in high-performance RF transceivers, scalable linear optical quantum computing processors for the next generation qubit computation, and chip-level quantum key generation and distribution circuits, among others.

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