Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1524164
70 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2024 gress must look past the CHIPS Act and invest in substrates and PCBs. We've seen hundreds of billions of dollars of private money follow public action, and now is the time to support the rest of the technology stack. In the years ahead, we will meet with legis- lators, policymakers, think tanks, and report- ers to tell our story. Remember, the CHIPS Act took almost five years to become law. at is why we need to communicate our issues clearly and consistently year over year. Don't sit on the sidelines as we fight to restore American manufacturing; now is the time to join our association and make your voice heard in Washington. PCB007 Shane Whiteside is chair of the Printed Circuit Board Association of America and president and CEO of Summit Interconnect. To read past PCBAA columns, click here. ficial intelligence to national security and crit- ical infrastructure, there is incredible demand for the next generation of microelectronics. While we may acquire some of what we need through nearshoring or friend-shoring, a long- term solution must include increased domestic capacity for the technologies that power our way of life. One sector where we have seen progress is national defense. e Pentagon understands the importance of substrates and PCBs for mis- sion-critical applications. Defense Production Act (DPA) investments have been awarded to several of our member companies, and PCBAA and IPC are jointly focused on sustained and robust funding of the DPA account. But national security is more than defense. One of our legislative goals is to change the nar- rative to include the trusted electronics pow- ering telecommunications, banking, the power grid, water systems, medical systems, air traf- fic control, and many others. is is why Con- Lasers have revolutionized the world since the 1960s and are now indispensable in modern appli- cations, from cutting-edge surgery and precise manufacturing to data transmission across optical fibers. There is a growing market for fiber lasers, which are currently used in industrial cutting, welding, and marking applications. They use an optical fiber doped with rare-earth elements (erbium, ytterbium, neodymium, etc.) as their optical gain source. They emit high-quality beams, they have high power out- put, and they are efficient, low-maintenance, dura- ble, and typically smaller than gas lasers. Fiber lasers are also the "gold standard" for low phase noise, meaning that their beams remain stable over time. But despite all that, there is a growing demand for miniaturizing fiber lasers on a chip-scale level. Erbium-based fiber lasers are especially interesting, as they meet all the requirements for maintaining a laser's high coherence and stability. But miniaturizing them has been met by chal- lenges in maintaining their performance at small scales. Now, scientists led by Dr Yang Liu and Professor Tobias Kippenberg at EPFL have built the first ever chip-integrated erbium- doped waveguide laser that approaches the performance with fiber-based lasers, combining wide wavelength tunability with the practicality of chip-scale photonic inte- gration. The breakthrough is published in Nature Photonics. (Source: EPFL) Miniaturizing a Laser on a Photonic Chip