Photonic integration in the palm of your hand: Generic technology and multi-project wafers, technical roadblocks, challenges and evolution

Mimicking the path of the semiconductor electronics industry, the photonic integration ecosystem has adopted the philosophy of generic technologies. The driving motivation is to serve multiple application domains, and spread the use of photonic chip technologies and platforms. Complementing the generic model with shared access to multi-project wafer runs, a cost-effective framework to start up in photonic integration has been established in the previous ten years. However, a larger adoption of these models is hampered by several roadblocks, related to different aspects such as access to, tools for, know-how on and use of photonic integration generic technologies. In this paper, a review of the the ecosystem current state, the roadblocks and paths to move forward are presented.