of Photonics Technologies: the European Perspective The Leverage Effect

The Leverage Effect of Photonics Technologies: the European Perspective
not have the research leadership in the highest bit rate systems it perhaps
once had, but there are several centres of excellence in telecommunication
and associated component research. The UK and France are
main players in the field, although Germany is also strong. The fields of
research that are strong include optical networking, integrated photonics
and semiconductor components, including ultrafast optics.
The production of components like laser diodes and other optical devices
is present in Europe. Although Asia is a major competitor in the
production of low cost high volume devices, significant volumes of
semiconductors for communication applications are made in Europe, although
many of these are sent to Asia for packaging. Indeed the majority
of component device packaging now takes place in Asia. More complex
devices and other hardware are often manufactured in Europe,
having about 45% of the global market. Also an increasing proportion
of optical fibre cables are made overseas with China and India becoming
major suppliers and North America remaining a strong supplier of
more complex specialist fibre. Components for optical information storage
systems are mainly produced in Asia and can be considered a low
cost and declining market.
In the field of integration of components to systems and creation of telecom
infrastructures, Europe has strong global players and is especially
strong in network design. Especially large companies from France, UK
and Germany are important to the world market. However, still in some
areas, SMEs are of importance and also a significant number of companies
focus on domestic markets. The number of companies who are
active in the running of telecom networks are limited, as this requires
large long term investments. Although most networks are national, an
increasing number of network operators are internationally oriented.
Manufacturing of purely optical storage systems has limited presence
in Europe, although there are some large multinational data storage
companies who are increasingly implementing optical communications
solutions with enterprise storage networks.
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The interlinkages between the different chains are limited. Linkage
between research and industry is nationally organised and fundamentally
different in the various countries. For example in Germany and
the Netherlands, this linkage is very strong. Often this is because of the
historic fact that the ICT networks were public, with close links between