NIST is the U.S. national metrology institute. Think measurement standards, physical constants, calibration, not engineering. These are the people who define what a kilogram is.

So when I walked into a packaging session at CLEO 2025 in Long Beach and saw NIST on the speaker slide. I did a double take.

Turns out they had a good reason.

You know, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) just published a photonic chip packaging paper in Photonics Research (Optica). Open access. doi.org/10.1364/PRJ.565…

When the metrology institute starts solving packaging, it means the packaging bottleneck is now a measurement problem. Photonic sensors can't reach the field without it.

Two topics from this paper I've already covered:

1. They do packaging with V-groove and fiber array which I covered with the quoted article and Citrini / Hunterbrook's HIMX report (photoncap.substack.com/…)

2. I also found "Hexapod" from the paper, which looks like from Physik Instrumente, Gemany, and covered by my lateste article (photoncap.substack.com/…) published this morning.

NIST validates the physics.

PhotonCap connects it to the market.