By placing the photonic components on a common chip or a device, the goal of Integrated Photonics is to establish miniaturized and integrated photonic systems with various functions and with applications in: optical communications, imaging, quantum information processing, instrumentation, sensing, etc. In such integrated photonic systems, the on-chip light generation, transmission, modulation, amplification, and detection are achieved by integrated combination of photonic components including light sources, beam splitters, gratings, couplers, polarisers, interferometers, detectors and so on.

Integrated photonics is influencing our everyday lives and will impact the way that we visualise and interact with the rest of the world. Integrated photonic systems for information processing and display will drive growth over the next decade. The communications market alone is expected to grow to $40 billion per annum by 2017. SU2P believes that there is a big opportunity for integration of low cost photonic components to develop, for example, new automotive and consumer products. Our work on all-polymeric photonics integrated circuits, silicon based photonics and diamond photonics for quantum information systems holds particular promise.