Microphotonics Center/Nanovation Technologies, Inc. Research Center

MIT’s Microphotonics Center has launched a major initiative with Nanovation Technologies, Inc. in microphotonics, the next technology platform for the Information Age. Nanovation will provide $90 million over the next six years to fund interdisciplinary research and establish a cutting-edge research facility, to be located at MIT.

The Nanovation Technologies research agreement has three primary benefits to MIT.

(1) It creates an important stimulus for research in the nation's largest economic sectors: telecommunications, data communications and computing. It provides a technology pull for the best that MIT has to offer from science to systems.
(2) It establishes a world class research facility. The campus will house the world's finest photonics research facility with end-to-end process capability and complete performance test and measurement.
(3) The research support allows an intensity in microphotonics research that is the dream of every scientist and engineer. Students have been attracted to microphotonics, because they see the rare opportunity to change the world through the force of their intellect. Faculty have chosen to invest their very limited time and very significant energy in this program, because we see microphotonics, the large scale integration of photonic functionality, as the next revolutionary technology.

We see microphotonics as the dominant infrastructure component of the Information Age.

The purpose of the Microphotonics Center is the creation of new materials, structures and architectures to enable the evolution of photonics from single discrete devices to strongly interacting, integrated photonic systems. The research of the Center is organized as a highly coupled set of activities that allow for individually driven discovery within a context of goal oriented research. The basic program units of the Center are Theory and Design; Materials and Processing; and Characterization and Performance. Students are expected to master a vertically integrated set of skills that extend to functional prototypes.

The Center was launched in the fall of 1998 by the Materials Processing Center and commenced activity with the pooling of intellect and on-going research funds of a group of faculty. The participating faculty had been working in loose collaboration across a variety of subjects ranging from components for telecommunications and computing to coatings. The driving forces for the organization were to amplify the synergy that had been realized through the multidisciplinary collaborations, and to attract industrial support to the MIT research. In 1999, Nanovation Technologies, Inc. responded to the industrial outreach effort.

The new Microphotonics Center initiative with Nanovation will pull together faculty from across campus to collaborate on research in a central laboratory facility. Mr. G. Robert Tatum, Nanovation’s President and CEO, and Physics Professor David Litster, MIT Vice President and Dean for Research, will oversee the research collaboration. The agreement will provide up to four endowed chairs and funding for new research initiatives within the Center.

The Nanovation Technologies research agreement represents an excellent match of the MIT vision for the field, and the company's vision for the evolution of communications technology. Communications at kilometer distances and interconnection at micrometer lengths confront a common barrier: bandwidth. The movement and management of information require high bandwidth pipes that are capable of distributing to the fine line tributaries of integrated circuit electronics. Today the inability to control optical carrier distribution requires many transduction steps to electronics and back. At the chip level, electronic speed is limited by the resistance, capacitance, and noise of metal conductors. Both the computing and the telecommunications industries have targeted revolutionary photonic functionality at all interconnection length scales.