Last year in an interview the president of IDEX's optics and photonics business discussed how photonics is still looking for its "silicon moment". "[S]till waiting, still searching"
"At Photonics West 2012, you said that “photonics is yet to have its silicon moment”. What did you mean by this? This is a phrase that I learned from Barry Schuler, who, as well as being a visionary at AOL, was my boss during my time at Raydiance. Looking at the computer and information technology industry, we see that a complete ecosystem has developed as the result of a single breakthrough invention – the microprocessor.
So when I say that photonics has not yet had its silicon moment, I mean that no single invention has compelled and forced the formation of an ecosystem that has allowed for standardization and economies of scale. In the absence of this silicon moment, photonics remains a cottage industry comprising multiple highly customised non-standard solution sets that don’t fit together very well.
Although the photonics market is worth [well] in excess of $10 billion, none of the players have been able to compel a consolidation through a product or product set that causes customers to gravitate towards that architecture, the way the microprocessor did in computing.
We were seeing the beginnings of a silicon moment during the dot-com boom when the business was trying to move from discrete fiber-optic communication networking equipment toward a planar waveguide solution that would allow for massively parallel wavelength division multiplexing.
That said, it is important to remember that even in those boom years, the maximum annual production of the key enabler, the erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), was 50,000 units per year. When we talk about high-volume standardized solution sets, we never quite achieved a silicon moment, not even in the glory days of fiber-optic communications. So we are still waiting, still searching."
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