Femtosecond fiber lasers enable 3D nanoprinting to connect components in the high-volume assembly of hybrid photonic integrated circuits, minimizing alignment requirements.

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are poised to transform applications such as high-speed optical communications, optical signal processing, optical sensing, and quantum information processing. Hybrid integration involves constructing a PIC using discrete chips made of two or more different materials, to exploit their complementary advantages.

Photonic wire bonding, the optical analog to metal wire bonding in electronics, considerably simplifies the assembly of such optical systems. Based on 3D nanoprinting of freeform optical waveguides, photonic wire bonding is a variant of additive manufacturing using two-photon polymerization (2PP).

Read our technical article which appeared in Photonics Spectra.