A Unique Chip In The World

A team from the UPV and iPRONICS manufactures the first universal, programmable and multifunctional photonic chip on the market

A team from the Photonics Research Lab (PRL)-iTEAM of the Universitat Politècnica de València and the company iPronics has designed and manufactured a revolutionary chip for the telecommunications sector, data centers and infrastructure associated with artificial intelligence computing systems. It is the first universal, programmable and multifunctional photonic chip in the world and is especially useful for communications, data centers, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, satellites, drones or autonomous driving, among many other applications.

The development of this revolutionary chip is the main result of the European UMWP-Chip project, led by researcher José Capmany and financed with an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The work has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

The chip designed and manufactured by the UPV and iPRONICS team allows programming on demand and interconnecting the wireless and photonic segments of the communication networks, avoiding the generation of bottlenecks that can limit both the available capacity and bandwidth.

"It is the first chip in the world with these characteristics. It can implement the twelve basic functionalities needed in these systems and be programmed on demand, which results in greater efficiency of the circuits," highlights Capmany.

The professor at the UPV, one of the international references in photonics, explains that applications such as 5G or the autonomous car require a higher frequency, which is why it is necessary to reduce the size of the antennas and associated circuits. In this case, what the PRL-iTEAM of the UPV and iPRONICS have achieved is that the converter behind the antenna, which is an interface chip, is as small and compact as possible, and that it is prepared to support current and planned future frequency bands.

This chip is already integrated into an iPRONICS product, the Smartlight, and is already being used by Vodafone in the testing phase.

“For us, the development of this chip represents a very important step because it has allowed the validation of our developments applied to a growing problem, the efficient management of data flows in data centers and in the networks of computing systems. of artificial intelligence. Our next objective is to scale the chip to cover the needs of this market segment, highlights Daniel Pérez-López, co-founder and CTO of iPronics.