New Photonics center holds grand opening

Over the past decades, the photonics sector in Montana has experienced growth. This growth can be seen in the grand opening of PHIX Photonics Assembly, an independent photonics packaging contract manufacturer, according to its informational video.

PHIX’s headquarters is located in the Netherlands, however, on Oct. 7, the company held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new building in Bozeman. Marking its official opening in the U.S.

The growth of photonics companies has been spreading throughout Montana — particularly in Gallatin County — according to Sean Spillane, a program manager at the Montana Photonics & Quantum Alliance (MPQA). 

With the opening of the PHIX location in Bozeman, Spillane hopes people in the community recognize Montana as a strong player in the industry. “We hope [the community] takes away that Montana is a strong global player in advanced photonics, and that we locally can play a role in helping both the U.S. and the state of Montana be competitive,” he said. 

When describing photonics to the general public, Spillane said an example would be a light bulb, where current passes through wires and generates light. “I’d say photonics is the ability to generate and manipulate light, just like electronics is the way to generate and manipulate electrons,” he said. 

Montana’s future has been impacted by the growth of photonics, as the industry helps to increase the state’s global impact. “We’re hoping that future initiatives here in the state will help grow the ability of Montana to contribute globally,” Spillane said. 

The MPQA supports photonic companies that produce all types of products, such as PHIX. “We and PHIX have customers that are looking at such a next generation networking, so passing data between different [Graphic Processing Units] and [Central Processing Units], inside a data center and that’s really targeted to reducing the power consumption of the overall data center,” Spillane said.

Photonics plays a large role in other developments such as autonomous driving. “Historically, Bozeman and particularly around MSU has had a big history of creating photonic systems for sensing the environment. A lot of them came out of University labs, including companies like Aurora [Innovations], which essentially help facilitate autonomous driving,” he said. 

Daniel Murphy, who was a graduate of MSU and now works as a mechanical engineer at PHIX provided an overview of the company. “PHIX is a photonics integrated circuit packaging company so we get the photonic integrated circuit and we combine them with fiber rays,” he said.

PHIX has numerous different types of customers, with the photonics center coming to Montana, there is hope in using photonics to benefit Montana’s future. 

“Customers come to us with needs for combining their circuit boards to their fiber optic rays,” Murphy said. 

For more information on the company, visit PHIX.com.