Microchips for light

The ability to accommodate billions of transistors on computer chips has dramatically changed our society. Photonics also plays a major role in increasingly powerful data processing systems. While the miniaturization of electronic components has been progressing steadily for more than 40 years, the field of integrated photonics is relatively new. At the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, we have developed processes for producing optical circuits on microchips which can be used for optical data transmission and optical signal processing.