Meint Smit is a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where he leads the Photonic Integration group at the COBRA Research Institute. Currently, his research focuses on Generic Integration Technology. Unlike today’s microelectronics, technology development in photonics is strongly application-specific: for almost every application a novel technology is developed, which makes the entry costs very high. This has prevented a breakthrough of Photonic Integration. In response to this, Smit pioneered the use of the microelectronics methodology in photonics, and contributed to the launch of open-access integration technology platforms for InP and Silicon Photonics.  

A key achievement has been placing lasers onto a piece of Silicon, relying on Indium Phosphide to generate light directly in the chip. Meint’s group are developing methods to build full photonic circuits in a thin Indium Phosphide layer on top of a silicon wafer containing the driver, receiver and control electronics, to realise very short and efficient connections.

Meint Smit graduated in Electrical Engineering at Delft University of Technology in 1974, and received his PhD in 1991 (with honors). In 1976, he joined Delft University of Technology. Five years later, he switched to optical communications and the research field of Integrated Optics. Meint became leader of the Photonic Integrated Circuits group of the Delft University in 1994.  

Meint is the inventor of the Arrayed Waveguide Grating for which he received a LEOS Technical Achievement award in 1997. A year later he was appointed Full Professor and his group, together with the groups of prof. Wolter and prof. Khoe (COBRA, TU/e) received a €40m research grant to establish a National Research Center on Photonics. In 2002 he and his group moved to TU/e. In 2002 he was appointed LEOS Fellow for contributions to the field of Opto-Electronic Integration. He is leading the InP platform (JePPIX) in which Europe’s key players in InP technology cooperatie on two major European projects (EuroPIC and PARADIGM). He has held many invited and keynote presentations and led a number of major European projects.