Towards the chip of the future

The European Innovation Council (EIC) has awarded 2.4 million to iPronics Programmable Photonics for developing programmable photonic chips. This has taken place within the framework of the EIC Transition programme, in which 42 projects from 24 countries were selected. Only five of these are led by Spanish companies, and iPronics, a Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) spin-off, is one of such companies.

The iPronics project is entitled “Innovating iN Smart Programmable IntegRatEd photonics (INSPIRE)”. According to José Capmany, iPronics chief operating officer, current technologies based on electronic transistors are approaching the limits of their fundamental capabilities, and therefore need to ally themselves with other, more innovative technologies. In this context, programmable photonics is key to addressing the voracious appetite for bandwidth, flexibility and processing speed required by many emerging applications, such as 6G communications, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles and machine vision.

"With this new grant, we will be able to get a little closer to the chip of the future, the programmable photonic chip. We will be able to take another step towards democratising access to the immense computational power that photonics possesses," says Daniel Pérez, the company's chief technology officer.

A revolutionary approach

The iPronics approach combines the best of electronics and photonics and is set to revolutionise the way information handling and processing systems have been conceived up to now. The key lies, among other things, in seeking cooperation with electronic systems, rather than competing with them. Its disruptive nature, not only as far as hardware is concerned, but above all in regard to its control and monitoring software, can break down the current access barriers to photonic chips, by reducing product development times and costs by more than 90%. "Our chips share a hardware platform which can be reconfigured by means of software. This low-cost solution allows the same chip to be used for an unlimited number of applications, which has a huge exploitation potential," says Ivana Gasulla, iPronics chief information officer.

The EIC will therefore give a new boost to iPronics, which is currently undergoing a growth phase. The company’s team is made up of specialists in the photonics, electronics and software development sectors. With this new funding, the iPronics team will be able to develop several demonstrator models of its technology over the next two years, targeting key market sectors such as Beyond 5G mobile communications networks and photonic computing in data centre environments.

About EIC Transition

EIC Transition 2021 is a new instrument of Horizon Europe, the EU's R&D&I programme. The call is aimed at projects from a small consortium of up to five partners or from a single entity (an SME, spin-off, start-up, research centre or university). Fourteen of the participants selected in this edition are Spanish, which confirms Spain as the programme’s third country by number of participants, only behind Germany (25) and Italy (17).

This call includes specific funding for energy capture and storage technology, and for medical technology and devices as well. It also includes open funding for projects in any technological field. In addition to funding, selected projects will receive access to a wide range of services related to business acceleration and development.

The EIC Transition programme supports activities aimed at validating an innovative technology, both in the lab and outside the lab, in order to create projects with commercial application. It also supports the development of the business model of the technology for its subsequent commercialisation.