India, April 21 -- Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are optical systems fabricated on semiconductor wafers, allowing complex optical processes to be performed on a chip-scale device. PICs have enabled a range of applications, notably as optical transceivers for high-speed communication within AI data centers, where they are widely used as the backbone of communication across servers to train the most complex machine learning models.

Most of the PICs today are based on silicon or silica, as the fabrication techniques for these materials are the most mature. However, silicon/silica have properties which make them suboptimal or even unusable for some emerging applications within quantum technologies.

As a result, quantum tech is one of ...