The European Manufacturing Platform for Photonic Integrated Circuits (EuroPIC) has received €3.75 million ($5.2 million) funding from the European community’s Seventh Framework programme to effect a fundamental change in the way applications based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are designed and manufactured in Europe

The organization will offer a new production paradigm to forge a sustainable business sector with potential for future growth. To do so, they will develop a generic technology capable of realizing complex PICs from a small set of basic building blocks.

Adopting a holistic approach to address the whole production chain, the consortium will carry out research into manufacturing methods and high-throughput processes to provide an open-access industrial generic foundry production capability for Europe.

EuroPIC is a collaborative project that has brought together a consortium of experts, including Europe’s small companies, industry and academic partners in the fields of component manufacturing, PIC design and application, packaging and photonic computer-aided design.