Effect Photonics’ optical transceivers tune in to the market

In January 2011, Boudewijn Docter and colleagues from Effect Photonics left a Silicon Valley building thinking they would never hear from the internet company again. Sure, it had been a good meeting, if a little short – their appointment, a former colleague of Docter’s, couldn’t spare them more than half an hour. But a small Dutch startup with no track record to speak of snaring one of the world’s largest internet companies as its first customer? That seemed a little too good to be true.

“Yet, to our big surprise, one week later, we got an email, asking when we were planning to submit our proposal,” tells Docter, who together with Tim Koene founded Effect Photonics in 2009. Only then, the Eindhoven-based team took a closer look at what their potential customer actually wanted, and whether they could make that happen. “We concluded that the photonic integrated circuit – our core business – was feasible, but its packaging would be a major issue. The kind of sophisticated packaging we needed simply didn’t exist at the time. However, we did have some ideas on how to cost-effectively develop one,” explains Docter, currently serving as president of the company.