About the Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing (IKIM)
The MIT Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing (IKIM) works to foster a thriving domestic manufacturing ecosystem and bridge MIT’s cutting-edge advanced manufacturing research to market commercialization.
The Challenge
The United States lost nearly one-third of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. The prevailing model of “innovate here/produce there” has left manufacturing and quality jobs behind, creating a disconnect between innovation and production.
Photonics technology was invented within and proliferated by the telecommunications industry from the 1970s onwards, and in this first iteration was characterized by a manufacturing ecosystem comprised of vendors specialized in particular device components. Today, a new form of densely integrated photonics is flourishing, one that takes advantage of lithography and the planar platform of a wafer to manufacture thousands of devices, fabricated by one unique vendor, for targeted applications.
New standards and best practice methodologies are emerging to leverage fabless silicon photonics—the outsourcing of the materials science and materials processing expertise requisite for building densely integrated devices—with a dedicated foundry such as the AIM Photonics fabrication facility, located at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. In this new manufacturing paradigm, the Small to Medium-scale Enterprise (SME) industry can take advantage of a critical concentration of semiconductor industry tools and expertise within a state-of-the-art fabrication facility, to produce small batch runs of application-specific products.
Our Approach
IKIM creates new education and training content, provides delivery platforms, supports manufacturing research programs, and develops policy recommendations. Originally focused on photonics, now addressing all advanced manufacturing technologies.
The intitiative helps industry professionals from various sectors—researchers, engineers, technician staff, management—master new standards and methods by making available numerous workforce training activities. Our original focus was photonics, but we now address all advanced manufacturing technologies.