Photonic IC and quantum computing market

USA: Reportlinker.com announced that a new market research report is available in its catalog: Photonic Integrated Circuit (IC) & Quantum Computing Market-By Application (Optical Fiber Communication, Optical Fiber Sensors, Biomedical), Integration (Hybrid, Module & Monolithic), Components, Raw Materials & Geography (2012 – 2022)

Photonic Integrated circuits (PIC) is a breakthrough technology as it uses photons (smallest unit of light) as the data carrier instead of electrons (smallest unit of electricity) used in electronic ICs. As light travels at very high speeds, PIC technology is widely used to transfer huge amounts of data at a very high speed.

Thus, the PIC based products are primarily deployed in the field of optical fiber communications. Photonic integrated circuits market is growing at a phenomenal rate as it provides significant improvements in system size, power consumption, reliability and cost.

The development of silicon photonics technology has helped in large scale manufacturing of PICs at low cost. Also current leading players have developed monolithically integrated Indium Phosphide (InP) based PICs that can integrate more than 600 components/functions in a single chip.

There is a huge competition in the market as each player is trying to innovate PIC based products which would be able to integrate large amounts of functions/components at low cost.

Optical sensors application is the other promising application in this market. It is used in fields like defense, aerospace, energy, transportation, medicine and other emerging fields.

Quantum computing is another application of PICs which is forecasted to be commercialized in 2017. This technology is expected to completely revolutionize the computing industry. PICs are also used in biomedical field. InP-based application specific photonic ICs are being used for the diagnostic analysis of opaque skin tissue. The technique principally used here is Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) or Raman Scatterometry.

At present North America has the largest market for PIC based products, especially in data centers and WAN applications of optical fiber communications. However, APAC is the largest player in the access network application of optical fiber communications right now. North America is the leader in PIC market with 49 percent market share however it is estimated that APAC will emerge as the market leader by 2022 growing at a CAGR of 35.9 percent from 2012 to 2022.

The report covers recent developments in the PIC industry like NeoPhotonics (US) acquiring Santur Corp. (US) in October 2011 and the acquisition of Opnext (US) by Oclaro (US). Several other acquisitions, mergers, new product launch, agreements etc. have taken place recently and are discussed in the report.

The growth of photonic IC market is expected to be phenomenal with the revenue growth from $150.4 million in 2012 to $1,547.6 million by 2022, at an estimated CAGR of 26.3 percent from 2012 to 2022.

The major players in the PICs industry are Infinera Corp. (US), NeoPhotonics Corp. (US), Oclaro (US), Luxtera (US), Kotura (US), OneChip Photonics (CA), etc.

These players have played a great role in changing the market dynamics. For example Infinera has introduced 500 Gb/s PICs used in long haul flex coherent super channels. The main features of this product are simplicity, scalability, efficiency and reliability. On the other hand Neophotonics has developed an Optical Line Terminal Transceiver using Photonic Integrated Circuit Technology which is designed to lower the overall cost of FTTH network installation.