Bridge
valley of
death
Design
iterations
Open-access multi-platform
wafer service, including:
Demonstrating benefts for
life science applications:
Enabling volume manufacturing of visible-range photonic ICs
Application
cases provide
evidence for
the need for
volume
manufacturing
of visible PICs
Photonic design
Design aggregation
Fabrication
Packaging
Testing
Multispectral
sources
Optical
coherence
tomography
Biosensors
Cytometry
... and
many more
world news
®
BIOPHOTONICS
PIX4life targets biophotonics
with visible-range PICs,
development capacity build
Photonics has become critical to life
sciences. However, the field is far
from benefiting fully from photonics’
capabilities, says the PIX4life consortium, a European partnership involving academic and research institutes,
foundries, fabless small- and mediumsize enterprises (SMEs) including technology suppliers and life sciences end
users, and larger product/systems
developers. The project is funded
through the European Union’s Photon-
ics21 program and contributions from
partners.
Today, bulky and expensive optical
systems dominate biomedical photon-
ics, even though robust optical func-
tionality can be realized cost-effectively
on single chips. Such chips are available
commercially only for applications such
as telecom, and at infrared wavelengths.
Although proof-of-concept demonstra-
tions for photonic integrated circuits
(PICs) in life sciences are abundant, the
gating factor for wider adoption is limited
in resource capacity.
PIX4life, launched in February 2016,
was established to facilitate European
R&D in biophotonics by helping
European companies and universities
bridge the gap between technological research and industrial development.
Through creation of an open-access
model to enable the production of low-cost, highly reproducible, and scalable
products, the project aims to lower
barriers to entry for testing and validating
biophotonics concepts.
European partnership PIX4life will design and produce state-of-the-art photonic integrated
circuits (PICs) that target life-science applications, helping nascent commercial products
through the famed “valley of death” that claims many innovations before they attract funding.
