Preciseley Microtechnology Corp. (hereinafter referred to as PMC) is the world's leading Fabeless designer and provider of MEMS chips, especially MEMS chips for optical communication applications. I learned on Photonics West that they had just moved to Vancouver, so the editor took the opportunity to visit this company that I had admired for a long time while in Vancouver.
PMC's new home in Vancouver is located in an industrial area next to the beautiful Simon Fraser University, on a 10,000-square-foot scale, typical of North American high-tech companies. The editor was hosted by Lawrence Lam (hereinafter referred to as Mr. Lin), the vice president of corporate engineering of Chinese descent. Despite his youth, he has been with the company for more than a decade, helping PMC ship thousands of high-quality MEMS chips.
What kind of company is PMC? Mr. Lin told the editor that their company was founded in 2006. The founder, Dr. Tiansheng Zhou, has nearly 30 years of experience in the field of MEMS optical chips. He has worked in Micralyne, JDSU, Mitel and other companies, and has also worked at the University of Alberta for a long time. , has more than ten patents in the fields of MEMS and nanotechnology. Starting from the customized design of MEMS chips, PMC has gradually become a leading enterprise in the field of global optical communication MEMS chips market. And what exactly makes PMC successful? Mr. Lin told the editor that although the MEMS market for optical communications is not large, the process difficulty is not low, and the ability to effectively grasp these process difficulties is the key to PMC's success.
For many companies that make MEMS products in the field of optical communications, I am curious why they do not enter the broader MEMS sensing market. Mr. Lin gave a clearer and complete answer. First, it’s not that they don’t do it, they have already entered the MEMS chip market for LiDAR and industrial sensing applications; second, as a MEMS chip design company, they can design different types of MEMS chips. It's just that different applications require different process lines to coordinate. There is no standard manufacturing process in the MEMS field, and there are many know-how problems. Therefore, it takes time to move from one field to another. Third, it also requires market traction. MEMS technology started in the printer field, and the optical communication field was one of the earliest markets. In the past ten years or so, with the improvement of power consumption, volume manufacturing, product life and other indicators for MEMS chip, the cost has become lower and lower, the repeatability has become better and better, MEMS technology has become more and more mature, and it will play a big role.
Recently, due to Google's OCS experiment, many people in the industry are paying attention to the future application of MEMS optical switches in data centers and AI fields, which has also made PMC the target of more people's attention. Mr. Lin told the editor that Google uses optical switches from a company named Crossfiber, and PMC has also done a lot of research in this field. They have planned to launch a 300X300 MEMS optical switch. The editor told Mr. Lin that in the past, there were cases where telecom operators and cloud companies introduced large-capacity MEMS switches for all-optical switching, but in the end they were not used on a large scale. What will happen this time? Mr. Lin’s view on this is that in the past, carrier-grade optical cross-connects were very difficult because they often had to take into account the compatibility issues of different technologies and the demanding Telcordia standard. The field of data communications is a brand new application and the reliability requirements are relatively loose, so there are greater opportunities. Moreover, the biggest problem of MEMS chips in the past was anti-vibration. PMC now has good technology to solve this problem. In short, if the market exists, the products will definitely keep up.
MEMS also has a very good prospect of combination with silicon photonics technology. Mr. Lin told the editor that some companies have now combined MEMS switches with silicon photonic chip design. Essentially, both are based on CMOS chip platform technology and can be integrated together. MEMS is not just a micro-mirror process. Many PN junctions used in MEMS are also the basis of silicon photonics technology. Especially with the development of semiconductor processing technologies such as DPUV, there will be greater opportunities for the combination of MEMS and silicon photonics in the future. .
I asked Mr. Lin where the name Preciseley came from, and he said that they might want to emphasize the high precision of MEMS technology. Mr. Lin told the editor that from PMC's standpoint, they believe that the greatest value of MEMS technology is its unlimited possibilities. Not only in optical communications, but also in industrial sensing, lidar, AR/VR, and biological detection, its uses are increasing. Each field requires special know-how and has a specific niche market. The development prospects of PMC are infinitely bright.
