OIDA Quantum Photonics Roadmap Says Advances in Product Engineering Necessary to Bring Quantum Technologies to Market

(NovusLight) Quantum technologies are expected to have major impacts in markets ranging from telecom and medicine to finance but advances in product engineering are necessary to bring the technologies to market, according to the newly released OIDA Quantum Photonics Roadmap.
The OSA Industry Development Associates (OIDA) roadmap clarifies the applications and timing for quantum technologies and specifies improvements in optics and photonics components needed to enable commercialization. It covers the three major application areas: quantum sensing and metrology, quantum communications and quantum computing.
Although the quantum technology market is still in the early stages, the optics and photonics community already supplies critical enabling components to research and development labs in the near term to ensure progress. OIDA estimates sales of optics and photonics for lab equipment used by quantum researchers at about US$100 million per year. The commercial market for quantum end-use products is expected to rise to billions of dollars by 2030.
“The real impact of quantum technology is what it can do, which could be far greater than the market for the technology itself,” Hausken adds. “The fear of missing out (FOMO) on that impact on competitiveness and security is driving funding in quantum research, which OIDA estimates at about US$2 billion annually.”
Investments in the product engineering of quantum technology could support classical applications as well. For example, investments in lower loss integrated photonics and single-photon detectors could yield benefits in classical optical communications and low-light imaging, respectively. Integrated photonics offers many promising solutions for quantum technology, at a time when it offers multiple solutions in other fields.