In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, host Dan McCarthy of TECH B2B Marketing sits down with Arne Leinse, CEO of LioniX International, to explore the manufacturing realities behind photonic integrated circuits (PICs) — one of the most technically demanding frontiers in semiconductor manufacturing.

As CEO of a module supplier built around silicon nitride waveguide technology, Leinse highlights the challenges that make PICs so difficult to produce at scale, from the need for sub-nanometer alignment tolerances to the “chicken and egg” challenge of building fabrication capacity ahead of market demand.

The conversation also explores how LioniX’s vertically integrated business model has helped it navigate this emerging manufacturing sector by unlocking flexibility across markets spanning quantum sensing to AR/VR. The episode also touches on industry standardization, in-process quality control, supply chain complexity, and the global talent strategies required to staff an emerging deep-tech sector.

Dan McCarthy: [00:01:11] Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Manufacturing Matters, the podcast where we talk about the trends and technology shaping global industry, logistics, and other sectors of the economy. I’m Dan McCarthy of TECH B2B Marketing. Joining me today is my guest Arne Leinse, CEO of LioniX International, leader in the development of MEMS and photonic integrated circuits, aka PICs. Welcome to the podcast Arne. Thanks for joining us today.

Arne Leinse: [00:01:51] Thank you very much, Dan.

Dan McCarthy: [00:01:54] So we are a little bit on the frontier of where we typically talk about manufacturing in this podcast. We’re sort of on the frontier of the semiconductor industry if you will. So let’s kick off with a little context. PICs — photonic integrated circuits — are to my mind the manufacturing story of the century, and they actually make semiconductor fabrication, already a manufacturing moonshot, seem almost simple by comparison. So before we dive in, tell us a little bit about what makes PICs so challenging to produce and what benefits could possibly justify all the investment, innovation, and risk that goes into their manufacture.

Arne Leinse: [00:02:28] I wouldn’t say that semiconductor manufacturing is easy compared to PICs, because semiconductor manufacturing is difficult and has its own problems and its own issues. So the main issues with integrated photonics manufacturing, the issues are different. So indeed we use photons instead of electrons, which all of a sudden means that the dimensions are also different. We are not talking about transistors or small electrical features. We’re talking about long interaction lengths. A waveguide which is crossing a full chip has a long interaction length, a very narrow line width, but it should be defect-free over a long path. So that all of a sudden has different issues in your lithography, in your etching, in your planarization of everything. So it’s different. I wouldn’t say it’s more difficult or easier. It’s a different game, which is indeed picking up. It’s compared to the semicon industry relatively new. We are in that respect several decades behind the mature semicon industry. But we are picking up and we are learning from the lessons that the semiconductor industry has done before.

Dan McCarthy: [00:03:33] And what are some of the benefits of PICs? What do they introduce that semiconductors alone cannot?

Arne Leinse: [00:03:41] Well, the nice thing is that if you, for instance, talk about signal processing. The standard telecom wavelength, 1.5 micron, which has a frequency of 193 terahertz, which is a very high frequency. All of a sudden you want to process small frequency bands of several GHz or 10, 20, or 50 GHz. Those kind of frequency bands are, if you transfer them to the photonic domain, actually very small ripples which are easy to process. So in photonics you can all of a sudden do processing, you can do signal transport, you can do things which in the electrical domain are either difficult or impossible. So it’s not a replacement of electronic technology. It’s an addition with new functionalities.

Dan McCarthy: [00:04:24] So you’re adding photonic components to a chip package, sometimes with ASICs and semiconductor chips themselves. What is so complicated about integrating photonics into that?

Arne Leinse: [00:04:39] Well, in standard ICs, the features are small, but the bump pads are large. And what I mean with large is compared to a cross section of a photonic integrated circuit. So with a photonic integrated circuit, you need to get the light in and you need to get light out in some way. And if you don’t do perfect overlap, then you lose photons and you can lose a lot of photons. So all of a sudden, you have an alignment issue where alignments in the order of 100 to 200 nanometers are critical. And then in multiple dimensions. And I didn’t say that electronic assemblies are easy, but at least you have less degrees of freedom, and alignment tolerances are less critical.

Dan McCarthy: [00:05:21] Right. And like I said, this is sort of a manufacturing issue to me. This why I think PICs is still, for all its benefits and all its advanced technology futures, it really comes down to a manufacturing issue, which is scale, which I’d like to get into next. So before we go into that though, tell us about LioniX now. Where does it fit into this value chain? And what makes its role unique and important?

Arne Leinse: [00:05:50] Yeah. So we actually started out as a chip making company, and engineering house and chip making company in photonics and MEMS, and over the last decade we transformed it to a vertically integrated company, where we do not just make our own chips. We also do the design, we build the modules, we do the electronics, we do packaging and assembly of that full module to supply customers with a module with a certain functionality and not just with a chip. And you see particularly in the new markets, like integrated photonics, there are no standards yet in how to integrate a chip in the package or to combine chips or different platforms together. So customers that use this technology need to be helped and they need a solution to be provided to them. That’s the reason why about a decade ago we made the decision to become vertically integrated, to not only make the chips but also to deliver functionality in a box. So we’re not a pure play foundry. We are a module supplier using PICs. And then in particular silicon nitride–based waveguides.

Dan McCarthy: [00:06:58] Right, which I want to ask you about too, because that is one of your proprietary technologies, silicon nitride. And just because it’s a little bit, again, unfamiliar to some of our listeners, it’s part of the waveguide that guides the light, and it’s a particular material. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Arne Leinse: [00:07:12] Yeah. Just to go back to waveguide, everybody knows what a fiber is. We all have seen these decoration fibers where light comes out. If you bend them too much, the light will leak out and you will see it at the edge of the fiber. Integrated photonics is not different. You just put those fibers on a chip and you do the signal processing on that chip. And there are different platforms that have matured over the last years or last decades actually, well-known for silicon photonics, that is used a lot nowadays in data centers, all based on silicon waveguides. You see a lot on indium phosphide. Indium phosphide is particularly good to generate light and do fast modulation. And you’ve seen in the last years or actually the last 10, 20 years also a strong development in silicon nitride, and silicon nitride is actually maybe even the best mimicking of that fiber. It’s a passive waveguide on a chip where you can do all sorts of signal processing with low loss. That’s the big benefit of our waveguide technology, that you don’t lose a lot of photons, and it is transparent also over a broad wavelength range. So where the traditional technologies that are developed for telecom, they work in infrared in the telecom wavelengths that are used historically, silicon nitride can also handle, for instance, visible light, which makes it all of a sudden an interesting material to use for new applications like AR/VR. If you want to project light, and if you want to do direct projection in the eye or on screens on your glasses, it helps if your waveguides can transport that light signal, and there silicon nitride has a very unique proposition.

Dan McCarthy: [00:08:48] So it minimizes loss. But it’s also — correct me if I’m wrong — but because it’s sort of based on silicon, it’s a little easier to integrate than some of the other materials out there, the more exotic materials, if you will, that guide light. Is that correct?

Arne Leinse: [00:09:01] Yeah, I agree. Since it’s on a silicon carrier, it’s very robust. I mean, if you handle an indium phosphide wafer, be careful with it. Don’t sneeze too hard. It’s very fragile. You can easily break it if you handle it wrong. A silicon wafer you can drop on the floor, pick it up again, it’s still intact. But that’s the big benefit. Once your wafer reaches to the end of your process and has high yield, it’s very robust also in the packaging and assembly afterwards. That’s of course a benefit from a long history of silicon processing. Silicon has been used standard in the SC industry for a long time already.

Dan McCarthy: [00:09:42] Right. But silicon neither produces light nor does it — it guides light with limitations, mostly infrared. Not an ideal solution for guiding the light. Electrons great. Photons not so much. The thing we talk a lot about in this podcast is the challenge of scaling up from prototype production. That’s a particular challenge for PICs, as you pointed out. You know, you have to design the chip and then you have to integrate that chip into a package that can then be put into a system. But can you dive a little deeper into the manufacturing hurdles when scaling PICs for higher-volume markets, like data centers, for example?

Arne Leinse: [00:10:21] I can, although you actually just used the wrong example there. And what I mean with that — the data center is actually the easy one to scale, because that’s one of the few applications where the volume is there. And if you have volume, the business case of putting a production line in place and making it is relatively straightforward. And what you’re seeing is that the silicon photonics is run standard a lot on the standard silicon lines of CMOS fabs or electronic fabs. And therefore it’s easier to do a scalable production there. And those volumes are there now, so there’s no justification, there’s no question about investing there in tools and in production equipment. The other platforms, like silicon nitride, for instance, the volumes are not there yet for all the other applications. Actually, data centers is one of the few that makes it to high volume already. The rest is coming. And there the main challenge is with the chicken and egg problem. Do you put a high-volume fab there to enable these applications to be realized? Or do you first want to wait till the volume is there until you build a fab?

Arne Leinse: [00:11:27] But building a fab is costing you two years, so then you’re too late. So the challenge there lies in having scalable production volumes, and therefore it lies in: How can I set up a medium-volume production or how to start delivering to the market at the volumes that are requested for the coming five years. And how can I combine multiple applications in one platform? So how can I do low volume, high mix, by standardizing cross section, standardizing processes, and that you’re not just making chips for one application, but in the same production line you can make chips for a lot of applications all in the same process. And therefore all these smaller applications, they add up to fill your fab. Because the only way you can run a stable fab is by running it, by doing production, by doing volume production, by starting as many batches, as many waves as you can because then you get statistics and you get a stable process and then you can deliver in the end known good die.

Dan McCarthy: [00:12:28] Right. And you’re right to correct me on the chicken and egg problem. Data centers is the high-volume one. That is where there is demand in order to sort of support the production of of PICs economically. But let’s look beyond data centers. How do manufacturing requirements for other applications compare to those end markets? What are the demands on the chips that are different, that make it harder for those to scale up?

Arne Leinse: [00:12:52] Well, the biggest demands you see there is particularly the newer applications, like satellite communication, like fiber optic gyros, like visible light applications. Quantum is one of the application domains which has very stringent demands for the photonic integrated circuits. So there the propagation losses are critical. You cannot lose any photons, as little photons as possible. So the critical steps in your fabrication process are way more critical than in the maybe more forgiving data center application, where you have smaller chips. And I’m not saying the data center applications are easy, but at least the chips are smaller and you can tolerate slightly higher losses than for instance in a quantum computer or in quantum sensing.

Dan McCarthy: [00:13:44] And loss has become more stringent. Obviously the alignment issue becomes more stringent, and that takes more time in the process. I’m not sure if LioniX is positioned to serve multiple markets or if you take all comers or you focus on one market, like the high-volume data center–type applications, but does serving multiple markets force trade-offs in your process capabilities or does your platform approach accommodate that?

Arne Leinse: [00:14:14] No, actually, we’ve always been around by serving multiple markets. The main reason we did that is because the platform allows us to. The nitrite is transparent from 405 nanometers to 2.35 microns, which has everything from visible light to the standard telecom window and even slightly behind that or slightly higher than that. So that means that applications like AR/VR, biosensing, lidar, fiber optic gyros, OCT, data centers, microwave photonics for satellite communication — that broad range. The nice thing is for silicon nitride, they’re all the same. And of course it’s not that straightforward, but the fabrication process you use for all of them is not different. We standardized a long time ago the cross sections as much as possible. And we call that design by geometry. We don’t play with the process. We just play with thickness and width. And of course the layout customers can play with. But we are not reinventing the fabrication process for every application. And then you can indeed have a broad range of applications. And of course, for specific wavelength ranges, you have your standards. We’re not reinventing a waveguide cross section for an application that is 10 nanometers higher in wavelength. You get the same as the one 10 nanometers lower, because in that way you can build up statistics, and you can indeed combine multiple applications in the same cross section and generate that volume even from the beginning already.

Dan McCarthy: [00:15:52] Understood. And this the part that makes PICs so interesting to me is these sort of engineering trade-offs in the manufacturing process to kind of keep that flexibility.

Arne Leinse: [00:16:00] PICs are nicely at that intermediate transition between the technology push, the academic uses, and the early adopters who used PICs 10, 20 years ago. Now it’s really picking up and it’s getting mature and it’s more about functionality than about exactly what PIC it is. Fifteen years ago, our customers wanted to know what exactly the cross section was and what the chip looked like. And now they want to know: What does it do? Can you make it reproducible? If yes, fine. How many can you sell me and what does it cost? And that’s a different discussion. And that’s where also your fabrication process and your tooling and your equipment need to align to.

Dan McCarthy: [00:16:47] It’s an exciting time I think for the industry. I’d like to get back into standardization in a minute. But before we go there, I’m curious what quality control looks like for photonic integrated circuits. It’s a big discussion for anyone in manufacturing. In-line inspection, functional testing. You’re testing at the package level. You might be testing for both electronics and photonic signals. So I’m just curious, what are the challenges there for testing and functional testing?

Arne Leinse: [00:17:15] The main challenges are with a lot of photonic features, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Particularly if you make things the first time or the first few times, you can only see whether it worked once you finished it completely. The more you start making the same, you can start translating: Hey, what measurement can I do in the middle? And how does that translate to my end result? And also there, ideally, you want to do as many photonic measurements as you can, because electronically you can measure a lot. And of course in the standard manufacturing process you do your visual inspection, you check your defects. You check, even nowadays with AI, you check your full images, image recognition of your wafers, and you can find your defects pretty clearly already. But you also want to do some probing halfway and translate what you’ve measured there to the end result. And any measurement you can do early in that process to determine which chip yields a known good die is a good one, whereby the frustrating thing or the challenging thing in integrated photonics is that the real measurement can only be done once it’s completely finished. And as I said, the moment you start going into production, that becomes easy or more easy, because then you make multiple times, you continue constantly the same design. You can translate that layout to measurements you do in the middle. The moment you start, particularly in that low volume, high mix, you need to really be careful on measuring the process control features in that process and not the specific chips that are in there for the application, because those application PICs, they are low volume. It could be different, could vary from run to run, but you need to make sure that you create your volume by creating correct process control features that always translate into the same performance and always give you the same result that you can interpret somewhere halfway down the process.

Dan McCarthy: [00:19:17] Is that more challenging for high-mix, low-volume chips? Because it sounds like you have to get the performance down first, and then you can know where to measure. Sounds a little trial and error.

Arne Leinse: [00:19:30] It’s more challenging. That’s why I said you should not measure the real functional device. That’s also not what we do with our customers. If we want to check whether our process went well, we check process control features. We have test chips. We have features on there that show us, yeah, the process went according to spec. And if we then know that spec and if we know it meets that spec, we can also design basically the first time right. Because we know what the deviations are for the process. We can manage that. We can measure that. If within that deviation we can simulate that the chip for the customer will work, then we also can be confident that it will work, because the complex thing — very often more and more you get more complex layouts of chips that need a full calibration file to set. You cannot measure that during processing. You can only do an assessment early on. And that’s where vertical integration comes into the picture. Because it’s not just making a chip. It’s also making something that’s robust, designing in a robust manner that you have your process variation designed in your layout. And if you then know that what you’ve made is within your design variations, then you can also be sure that what you’ve made will work for your customer. And then it doesn’t matter anymore what the functional chip of the customer is, as long as it is designed within those limitations. And some customers or engineers always want to push the boundary: Oh, but if we could do this, then we get better performance. But it’s less robust. And there you have to move them away and say: No, stick with the robust ones. If you want to try something new, then first validate those building blocks in a more robust environment, and then you can translate them.

Dan McCarthy: [00:21:12] Understood. Getting back to standards, we talked a little bit about why they’re important to efficiency in the manufacturing process. I’m just curious, industry-wide, the early semiconductor industry sort of had to evolve its standards in unison, right? Sort of monolithically move forward, implemented standards on common interfaces, protocols, component libraries. Are PIC designers, equipment makers, and foundries attempting something similar now? Is standardization moving forward monolithically or is there a path for individual companies to sort of establish that as well? And where’s that divide?

Arne Leinse: [00:21:54] There’s not one golden standard there. There is, however, more and more the last year’s trend towards standardizing interfaces, same as what you see, like you described in the SC industry. The interface on the fiber side is nowadays standardized. What you can do there, how you have alignment loops in there, how you package it. However, the interface of one platform to the other is not standardized yet. So there in our platform, we can adapt more profiles and pitches and angles and everything to the other platforms. There’s not one golden standard yet for transferring from one platform to the other. There’s still missionary work to do there, so to say. And that will come. That will happen, because you see more and more hybrid and heterogeneous integration. You see more chiplet integration or PIC-let integration of active components on platforms. And that means that if you want to mix and match different platforms, you will also see automatically that standardization is enforced there by the applications drizzling down towards the foundries, because it’s in everybody’s benefit if you have a standard on a cross section or a standard on an interface.

Dan McCarthy: [00:23:12] So that’s industry wide. How do companies like LioniX improve your internal efficiencies and standardization without compromising flexibility? We talked about this a little bit earlier.

Arne Leinse: [00:23:24] Yeah. And that’s exactly why years ago, we froze our cross sections. We froze our fabrication process. That doesn’t mean we do not keep on tweaking and optimizing it, but not in customer batches. We don’t do that. In the early days, when we just started, every batch of a customer was different, because our engineer said, “Oh, if we do this better, we could improve the performance.” Nowadays we don’t do that. That’s our workhorse. We run that in parallel. We got parallel lines where we do optimization, we validate stuff. But if you’ve done it over a number of times, then you can bring that optimized process into your main process, so you need standardization. You need to fix things, but you still need the playroom to — and that’s the reason why a company like ours, we do product development and small-volume production also for our customers. The moment you go into a high-volume production fab, that flexibility of course is less.

Dan McCarthy: [00:24:25] Right.

Arne Leinse: [00:24:25] That’s also the sweet spot where we are. We are in that transition from module to small and medium volume. For the wafer fabrication, once it becomes real medium volume, we transfer it to a medium-volume foundry or a high-volume foundry. We get the chips back and we build the modules for our customers based on that. But you need to make sure that you can handle that standardized process but still have the freedom to try new things in real parallel fabrication runs, in parallel production lines.

Dan McCarthy: [00:25:00] And this where your vertical integration is a benefit.

Arne Leinse: [00:25:03] The vertical integration is a benefit because the tricky part is it’s not just in a photonic integrated circuit. In the end, the performance is in the module, performance is in how well do my chips connect to it? How well can I assemble it? How robust can I assemble it? Where are my reference planes? What’s my wafer bow. Do I have some smile in my chip or not, if I connect the other chip to it? If I do this and maybe make some stress relief there, my assembly becomes way simpler. So all those kind of tricks help if you also face the problems in the end. I mean, if you just make the chips and you let somebody else figure out the packaging — engineers are creative. They can solve it but maybe not always at the most elegant or more cost-effective way.

Dan McCarthy: [00:25:49] Understood. So your internal structure is giving you some flexibility and standardization. I’m curious, where does the limit of that — maybe let me rephrase that a little bit. How important are external forces like governments, industry consortiums to sort of the overall success on standardization? Where do they come in? What’s the value?

Arne Leinse: [00:26:12] Good point. Good question. The main point there is that, what we see happening, for instance, in the Netherlands — you see that happen more across Europe also — is that integrated photonics and process design kits are appointed as a key enabling technology. It’s important to the market. There are different research programs in standardizing the platforms, enabling process design kits to be fabricated such that users can also access the technology. And multiple of these PDKs should be able to work together in building multi-PIC solutions for customers. The government has a role there by facilitating or by pushing forward these kind of developments and enabling them, because if you do it as just one party, you can try to set the standard, you can try to build these kinds of things, but if the rest doesn’t follow, it doesn’t work. If you really want to make sure that I can make standards in, for instance, silicon nitride chip and indium phosphide chip, it helps if the indium phosphide chip speaks the same language.

Arne Leinse: [00:27:32] Then it helps if you got development programs and where all partners are connected with the software vendors, also with the design house in the end. That in the end everybody speaks the same language and says, Hey, if we do this, it enlarges the application domain in which we can use these. Well, then it can drizzle down into the foundries, into the designs, into the PDKs. And that only works if you work together. If everybody wants just to do its own business or its own product, then you solve your own problem, and that works very well for a lot of companies, for a lot of things. But if you are a platform, you do a lot of technology pushing, if you’re a platform developer, it helps if you have input from a broader range and that the rest of the components that we need in our platform or the packaging that we need, at least they obey the same design rules.

Dan McCarthy: [00:28:29] Yep. Okay, that makes sense. One other question I was thinking about — it’s not as specialized as maybe I made it out to be earlier — but workforce. Is there a particular profile of people that you’re drawing from other industries or people specializing in this in their education now? How hard is it to find qualified workers in this, both based on the educational output as well as today’s market?

Arne Leinse: [00:28:58] Yes and no. The good thing is that nowadays it’s a global market. So we are currently around 70 people. We have 15 nationalities within the company. So we are very lucky that we can still find good people, we can still hire good people. For different disciplines, it varies what skills you need. Some people, I like them to be able to handle a set of tweezers, that you know how to pick up a wafer ora chip. And some should be very good with designing, and we need all of those. But the main thing that we’ve seen change over the last years is particularly that our hiring process is more a global process nowadays, a European/global process, than in the old days, where all your employees already lived closer to the university here or to the companies here. And that really changed over the last five to 10 years. As I said, we now have a multicultural company with a lot of nationalities, which is fantastic I think. It really brings something to the company if you got that diversity within the company. And you see that there’s really good talent also coming from abroad.

Dan McCarthy: [00:30:18] Did that trend coincide with your shift into PICs from MEMs? Did you start to go more global as you got more photonic?

Arne Leinse: [00:30:29] No, we actually started with photonics back in 2001. We started in January 2001 as Lion Photonics back then. But the telecom bubble burst in actually that same month or the month after. So all our customers went bankrupt in that first period. And then we started adding MEMS and microfluidics, and since then we’ve always been doing MEMS, fluidics, and photonics. In those early years, after the bubble burst, the MEMS, fluidics were the dominant work we did. But photonics never faded out because when the bubble actually burst, we said we need to reinvent the photonics because the platform we worked on then was not scalable, was not fully manufacturable, and we really went back to the drawing board and said, How can we make it with standard equipment, something that’s reproducible and volume manufacturable? And that’s where our TriPleX platform also came from, by using standard equipment from the solar cell industry. So therefore the photonics has never been gone. What we’ve seen is that particularly when we grew over the last five to 10 years and we needed more engineers, that’s when indeed the pool here wasn’t refreshing quick enough to get them from local sources, from local universities or local schools here. So then the pool gets relatively quickly bigger. And also COVID has helped in that respect that due to all the, like we do now, the video conferencing and everything, the world has become smaller. So doing job interviews with people across Europe or across the world is much easier nowadays than 10 years ago, when we were sitting around a conference call machine and you couldn’t see each other. It makes applying for a job and also having job interviews easier when you can quickly schedule a Teams meeting and have a quick call with them and just select the most promising candidate and fly him or her over here to discuss further.

Dan McCarthy: [00:32:43] Interesting. That’s interesting. Is there anything we haven’t talked about that we’ve kind of glossed over or understudied?

Arne Leinse: [00:32:54] Not necessarily. I mean, we touched upon how the volume capacity should scale along with the demand. And that’s of course what you see happening now, particularly in silicon nitride. Silicon photonics is traditionally more made in the electronics fabs that are used to handling silicon insulator or silicon photonics already. They run it in the sideline of their production capacity. Silicon nitride actually, there is no dedicated silicon nitride medium for these foundries. We see that being started now. We see different volumes starting to do either nitride on the side or started as a dedicated nitride initiative, like the New Origin initiative we’re putting on a map here in the Netherlands to indeed build particularly targeted medium volume, what the market is needing for the coming five to 10 years, and not immediately aim for “We need 50,000 wafers per month,” because integrated photonics will not be there for the coming years. So those volumes will go up but not immediately to the high volume that electronics already has.

Dan McCarthy: [00:34:23] Yeah. That actually brings to mind a question about supply chain for me. So when you talk about photonic integrated circuits as opposed to semiconductors, you’re using a lot more materials. You need indium phosphide for the lasers. You need different materials for the waveguides, like silicon nitride or others. And then you have other components on there: modulators and whatnot. Is the supply chain more complicated for you? Does that present any challenges currently? Changes particularly with supply chains?

Arne Leinse: [00:34:52] Is that supply chain is so much more complicated than in the semicon industry? If I open up a multi-IC package in the semicon industry, there are also chips from different foundries, different platforms in there. That’s of course not different, although that industry is more mature and running more volume already. So then, yes, they all run in different quality standards. They are more used to delivering a certain quality and traceability level. And photonics is evolving, is catching up there. And therefore you need to make sure, and you ask about what role does the government have in there. You need to make sure the full supply chain is developing in that same pace. So that’s where the governments have a role there to push those developments. Because if you can do everything except for one component, you still cannot make your module. You need all parties to be on board of that supply chain. And the weakest link there determines whether you can make the product in the end or not.

Dan McCarthy: [00:36:07] Correct. And this is where ecosystems, government-backed ecosystems like PhotonDelta are coming into play.

Arne Leinse: [00:36:14] Exactly, exactly.

Dan McCarthy: [00:36:16] Well, I appreciate your time. This has been the most illuminating conversation. I really appreciate all the insights you provided. And thank you for joining the show.

Arne Leinse: [00:36:30] Thank you very much for this interesting session. Thanks.

Dan McCarthy: [00:36:33] And for everyone else, thank you for joining as well. I hope you enjoyed this conversation and you found it illuminating as well. And if you want to see it online or see some of our other podcasts, you can find them on manufacturing-matters.com or download them on your favorite podcast platform. I’m Dan McCarthy. Again, thanks for joining me Arne Leinse from LioniX International. I appreciate the conversation we had today.

Arne Leinse: [00:36:57] Thank you very much.