Shareholders Meeting. National Photonics Initiative
Anyone go to the shareholders meeting and able to report?
Look at this link to National Photonics Initiative in the US.
https://www.lightourfuture.org/key_recommendations/communications/
This is an exerpt from the Communications and IT white paper
R&D Funding Europe, Japan, and China have made significant R&D investments in technology and telecommunications in recent years. Consequently, Europe is now strong in high-speed communications, Japan in photonic integration, and China in access network technology. Meanwhile, the US effort has less government support — and the support is less strategic and less centralized. The US optical communications equipment supply chain has been dismantled since the early 1980s, when AT&T controlled the ecosystem from top to bottom. It has been rebuilt overseas, with market share shifting particularly to Asian suppliers. R&D also fragmented and synergies within the US economy were lost. Offshore suppliers gained strength, making it more difficult for US-based manufacturers to recover market share. This fragmentation also makes it difficult for companies to differentiate their products. The result is that content managers such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon and Netflix are leveraging the technology with large profit margins, while the infrastructure providers including companies such as AT&T and Verizon, as well as telecom equipment vendors, face declining margins. The result is a lack of concentrated R&D funding necessary to drive the next stages of optical communications innovation. Cooperative industry and government funding in R&D will enable and accelerate the commercialization of solutions for use in the US infrastructure and abroad, and it will preempt other countries from dominating the technology to the exclusion of the United States. Past R&D funding by US agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Standards and Technology and others has been successful in enhancing US industry leadership in optical communications. For example, DARPA’s High- Productivity Computing Systems program supported the development of optical interconnects for hundreds of thousands of high-performance processor cores for IBM’s POWER775 computing systems. Government agency support and partnerships with IBM, Avago Technologies, and US Conec enabled commercialization of the first system with much higher interconnectivity than earlier systems, helping to maintain US leadership in high-performance computing, another field increasingly challenged by foreign competition. Meeting the challenge requires a healthy ecosystem of domestic network providers, data center operators, communications equipment vendors, and component suppliers. Yet, as the National Research Council (NRC) report notes, “[m]any of the optical communications successes over the last 10 years are built on earlier research that came from research laboratories of vertically integrated companies, as well as strongly supported government agencies. The industry is no longer integrated, but instead is segmented….In this
fragmented environment there has been a reduction in industrial research laboratories, because the reduced scale makes it difficult for companies to capture the value that is prudently needed to justify investing in researchv.” Opportunities for investment should include next-generation manufacturing technology.
Key topics include greater integration of photonics and electronics, optical interconnections between and within chips, advanced optical packaging processes, devices based on nano-photonic technologies, and fiber optic spatial multiplexing. Research topics for special equipment for military needs might include photonic integration for radio frequency (RF) photonics, quantum communication and free-space communication such as that between satellites. Recommendation: Renew and increase federal funding for future generations of technology, with programs that allow access by researchers in publicly
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Wonder if there are going to be North American policy changes that re-ignite photonics and possibly FSO.