The goals of the Center for Integrated Photonic Systems are:

(1) To provide leadership and direction for research and development in photonics.

The core activity of CIPS is the development of a long-range vision for research and the development of integrated photonic devices & systems. CIPS will host forums and facilitate working groups with industrial consortium members to identify and discuss technology and roadmapping issues:

• technology directions
• potential disruptive technologies
• technical barriers (gaps)
• actions needed to enable future-generation systems, and
• manufacturing and market issues that drive timing of technology deployment.

As an academic institution we can work openly with a variety of different organizations in developing and gathering input for our models. Whether it is performance data for new devices ‘in the lab,’ yield data for existing manufacturing processes, planning documents, or first-hand observations of the corporate decision making process, CIPS researchers benefit greatly from the unique relationship between MIT and industry. The level of detail and intellectual rigor of the models being developed here is complemented by the high quality of data available to us. CIPS researchers are developing models of optical and electronic devices, the packages they are wrapped inside, the manufacturing processes that assemble them, the standards that define them, the market that buys them, and the policy processes which influence their deployment.

(2) To foster an Institute wide community of researchers in the field of integrated photonics & systems.

The Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Economics are consistently ranked as the top graduate programs in the country. Likewise, the Sloan School of Management has consistently ranked first in the nation in the areas of information technology, operations research, and supply chain management. CIPS leverages MIT’s strengths, by unifying the photonics researchers in these departments and laboratories to focus on technology developments in photonics.

The combined volume of research funds in the photonics area at MIT exceeds $20 million dollars annually.

The faculty and staff at MIT in photonics related areas have included Claude Shannon (founder of information theory), Charles Townes (inventor of the laser), Robert Rediker (inventor of the semiconductor lasers), and Hermann Haus (inventor of the single frequency semiconductor laser & ultrafast optical switch). CIPS affiliated faculty and staff continue this tradition of excellence in areas ranging from optical network architectures to novel optical devices to novel photonic materials.

(3) To integrate member companies into the MIT photonics community.

CIPS will host annual meetings and seminars in photonics. For CIPS member companies, focused visits to the Institute for individual companies will be organized with faculty and graduate students. In addition, CIPS will hold forums geared towards the creation of campus-industry teams to pursue large-scale research programs. CIPS will host poster sessions at the annual meeting so as to introduce graduate students and their research to industry.

CIPS publications will include a resume book of recent graduate students in the area of photonics. Graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have founded 4,000 firms which, in 1994 alone, employed at least 1.1 million people and generated $232 billion of world sales. Photonics related companies founded by alumni include Sycamore Networks, Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, and 3Com as well as recent start-up such as OmniGuide.

Member companies have the opportunity to guide the research of CIPS faculty and students through the Working Groups (WGs) and individual graduate student awards.