Agreeing with the motto of the Shvabe holding of the Rostec State Corporation “Photonics: electronics of the future”, we can say that we are at the very beginning of the photon revolution, although photonic devices have been around us for a long time. Light-emitting diodes or laser diodes are light, compact, cheap, durable and long-lived devices, generate less heat and require less energy than traditional light sources.

 

At the start of the era of photonics, Russian scientists were among the pioneers: our primacy in quantum electronics and laser technology is undeniable, and the term photonics itself was proposed in Russia. And today we need to restore positions.
Electronics will help us with this. And the list of tasks for its development is long. Here are some of them. Optical cables provide many benefits, the electronics that support them cannot take full advantage of the speeds that optical cables can provide. This means that transceivers used with optical systems can often be slower than a differential pair over short distances. To make the most of optical systems, transceivers need to increase their speed, and this will require research into new photonic semiconductors. If chips can be designed with built-in optical ports, the need for printed circuit boards with built-in waveguides will become significant, as this will allow chips In terms of sales of photonics, the share of our country in the global market is less than 1%. At the same time, Russia has preserved the strongest physical school that works precisely in line with photonics. Possessing a great scientific potential, we are still inferior to other states in commercial application, but the prospects are huge and are presented in this issue of the journal. to transmit data through printed circuit boards via optical communication channels. This will not only help reduce system complexity, but will also provide extremely high speed connections between the photonic parts. For example, future digital processors may use an optical bus for RAM and an electrical bus for slower peripherals.