2025 Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award Winner
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CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre Team Named the 2025 Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award Recipient
Optica is pleased to announce that The CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre Team, UK, has received the 2025 Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award. The team is recognized for sustained delivery of a truly open-source silicon photonics foundry that follows the ethos of flexibility, collaboration, and openness to support researchers around the world.
The Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award was established in 1989 and named in remembrance of Paul F. Forman, who helped raise visibility for the optical engineering field in 2007. The award recognizes technical achievements such as product engineering, process, software and patent development, as well as contributions to society such as engineering education, publication and management, and public appreciation of optical engineering. It is endowed by Zygo Corporation, Canon Inc, Optical Research Associates (now the Optical Solutions Group at Synopsys), Cambridge Research & Instrumentation, Inc, and individual contributors, Barbara Marks-Forman, Gary and Carolyn Bjorklund and G. Michael Morris.
The CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre team are making cutting edge technology more open and available via their open source, license free silicon photonics rapid prototyping foundry service. The silicon photonics chips fabricated by CORNERSTONE have helped to spin out companies, led to many world firsts, and supported early career researchers starting their journey in photonics.
CORNERSTONE is unique in that it is truly open source – everything is available to download without a license from their website – and it offers process flexibility to support cutting-edge research. CORNERSTONE is one of only a few foundries in the world that offers integrated photonics platforms that can support wavelengths from the visible to the mid-infrared, via their silicon nitride, silicon-on-insulator (SOI), suspended-Si and Ge-on-Si platforms. This enables not only the mainstream datacom and AI applications, but also emerging applications such as quantum, LiDAR, mid-IR sensing for healthcare and environmental monitoring, and measurement of therapeutic drug concentration, to name but a few.
CORNERSTONE shipped their first chips in 2017 and since then has demonstrated great tenacity and dedication to sustain the facility while holding true to their values of supporting researchers and entrepreneurs in a flexible, reliable, and timely manner. To complement this, the CORNERSTONE team has positioned themselves as the ideal transition between a university lab and these scale-up foundries, something that the community demands, demonstrated by the fact that CORNERSTONE has now shipped chips to 24 countries.
Recognizing that rapid turnaround is critical to the success of companies seeking to commercialize silicon photonics, the CORNERSTONE team dedicates itself to delivering quickly without compromising on quality. In 2024, the team delivered a silicon nitride multi-project-wafer batch in just three weeks, when the industry is more familiar with three months.
Building on the success of the silicon photonics rapid prototyping foundry, the CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre was launched in 2024 to expand the services offered by the team beyond a traditional foundry, with new initiatives such as start-up support programs, innovation funding distribution, and expansive training activities, with the overarching mission of building a pipeline of silicon photonics enabled companies in multiple industries.
In summary, the CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre team has sustained the delivery of an extremely valuable, impact-generating foundry service that fills a significant gap in the global silicon photonics ecosystem.
Team Members
| Graham Reed Callum Littlejohns Marc Sorel Xingzhao Yan Thalia Dominguez Bucio Milos Nedeljkovic David Thomson Frederic Gardes Goran 1Mashanovich Harold Chong Ying Tran Mehdi Banakar Eugenio Di Gaetano Sarah-Jane Bridger Martin Ebert Eleni Tsanidou James Le Besque Hamza Rouabah Hanuushah Vizabaskaran Ali Emre Kaplan Georgia Mourkioti Libe Arzubiaga Totorika Tania De Los Santos |
Ramsey Selim David Rowe Aiman Hazim Shafizam Emily Crawshaw Monika Bakalarz Bharat Pant Averil MacDonald Ben Clark Pearl John Mark Willoughby Clive Holmes Anna Peacock Jize Yan Khaled Mohammed Tom Carnay Lakshmi Nath Ruth Churchill Justyna Lisinska Shengqi Yin Daniel Luce Annette Daley Andy Sellars |
About Optica
Optica, Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, is the society dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving and dissemination of knowledge in the field. Founded in 1916, it is the leading organization for scientists, engineers, business professionals, students and others interested in the science of light. Optica's renowned publications, meetings, online resources and in-person activities fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate scientific, technical and educational achievement.
