NEWS PHOTONICS
Effect Photonics’ optical transceivers tune in to the market It’s been quite the journey, but Effect Photonics is finally ready to take the telecom market by storm with its tunable optical transceivers. In doing so, it will give the Dutch Photondelta integrated photonics ecosystem a most welcome boost, too. Paul van Gerven
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n January 2011, Boudewijn Docter and colleagues from Effect Photonics left a Silicon Valley building thinking they would never hear from the internet company again. Sure, it had been a good meeting, if a little short – their appointment, a former colleague of Docter’s, couldn’t spare them more than half an hour. But a small Dutch startup with no track record to speak of snaring one of the world’s largest internet companies as its first customer? That seemed a little too good to be true. “Yet, to our big surprise, one week later, we got an email, asking when we were planning to submit our proposal,” tells Docter, who together with Tim Koene founded Effect Photonics in 2009. Only then, the Eindhoven-based team took a closer look at what their potential customer actually wanted, and whether they could make that happen. “We concluded that the photonic integrated circuit – our core business – was feasible, but its packaging would be a major issue. The kind of sophisticated packaging we needed simply didn’t exist at the time. However, we did have some ideas on how to cost-effectively develop one,” explains Docter, currently serving as president of the company. Co-funded by their new-found Silicon Valley patron, Effect Photonics started developing an integrated optical transceiver that can send sixteen different data streams over a single optical fiber cable. This would enable every fiber internet user to have his
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own dedicated bandwidth, without giving him his own fiber cable. Clearly, that would be a major step up from users having to share the connection to their provider with a number of neighbors, resulting in performance loss during peak internet hours.
Photondelta’s growth strategy
But after a couple of years, Effect Photonics’ customer had scaled up its fiber ambitions and decided it didn’t want to wait for new technology after all. When it pulled the plug on the project in 2014, “we thought that was the end of the company,” says Docter.
Photondelta was set up in January 2019 to boost the emerging Dutch integratedphotonics industry. Its mission: to drive growth in terms of turnover (over 1 billion euros), resources (over 4,000 FTE) and number of participating companies (more than 25) by 2026. These goals are already very challenging considering the relatively limited time frame and resources, but on top of that, Photondelta has to operate in a doubletrouble environment: an emerging new technology with (long-term) potential in likewise new emerging applications and markets. To face this complexity, Photondelta identified four key target markets: medical devices & life sciences, datacom & telecom, infrastructure & transportation and agriculture & food. First, the organization performed a thorough analysis of relevant key trends, drivers and unmet needs by meeting with key prospective customers on a global level. Their unmet needs were then matched with the cluster’s current and future product and technological capabilities. This resulted, at the end of last year, in the identification and prioritization, based on growth potential, of a limited number of key areas where Photondelta has the potential to further build and expand its portfolio of promising and differentiating solutions and where to focus on to effectively and efficiently target growth. Earlier this year, dedicated focal area teams, staffed with business and technology experts from companies and knowledge institutes or purposely hired, have been set up and chartered to further sharpen relevant propositions and business/technology roadmaps, in open collaboration with global leading customers and end-users. These insights will drive further expansion of the portfolio offering, acquisition of new customers and cluster partners, as well as guide further Photondelta investments. The focal area discussed in this article is called “Optical transceivers for ultra-high data transfer for short-haul/metro telecom fiber-based access networks/datacenters.”
