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16 Jan 2025
Venture support for startup working to combine silicon photonics with active compound semiconductor materials.
Photon IP, a startup company in The Netherlands looking to improve the performance of photonic chips by closer integration of silicon and non-silicon semiconductor materials, says it has closed a round of seed funding worth €4.75 million.
Led by the Dutch deep-tech venture outfit Innovation Industries, the round featured additional support from Lisbon-based Faber, the local Brabant Development Agency (BOM), and PhotonDelta.
Photon IP says that the financing will help to accelerate the industrialization and commercialization of its technology, which is said to combine silicon photonics with active devices like laser diodes that are typically fabricated in gallium arsenide (GaAs) or indium phosphide (InP) materials.
Materials combination
Photon IP’s CEO and co-founder Rui Santos, who was most recently principal scientist at the nearby InP chip foundry Smart Photonics, said of the startup’s approach:
“We’re not just advancing integrated photonics - we’re simplifying the manufacturing process for photonic circuits as well.
“With our advanced optical engines, we’re setting a new performance benchmark and eliminating the barriers to efficiently combine III-V materials with silicon. This funding expands our ability to grow our team to bring our first products to market.”
Target markets for the technology include optical communication networks, data centers for artificial intelligence (AI), and sensing applications relying on photonic chips, which all stand to benefit from much more efficient performance if the silicon and non-silicon elements of their design can be closely integrated.
While various approaches are being explored to solve that efficiency problem, the current AI data center boom and its associated power requirements has seen the likes of Google and Amazon look to nuclear power to meet demand.
“The core technologies available to efficiently integrate multiple materials on a single photonic chip are becoming a fundamental barrier,” stated Photon IP. “Existing schemes for photonic integration can’t keep pace to deliver the performance, energy efficiency, and the small footprint required.”
Integration scheme
Santos and his team are looking to address the challenge by “reinventing” the way that silicon and materials like InP are integrated onto a single chip.
“This breakthrough radically simplifies the manufacturing process and opens a path towards mass deployment for advanced low-power optical engines for a wide range of applications,” claims the firm, although it provided no details of the precise integration scheme it is pursuing.
One possible approach involves a combination of flip-chip bonding of InP die on a silicon nitride carrier material with novel laser soldering, as described in a June 2023 paper co-authored by Santos and another Photon IP co-founder, Xaveer Leijtens, among others in the Dutch photonics ecosystem.
That paper describes two possible integration schemes, one using through-silicon laser soldering of photonic integrated circuits, and another employing heat-conduction laser soldering.
According to the paper, the through-silicon soldering approach is faster and require less power, and has lower thermal impact, which is seen as an advantage with larger InP dies.
“These results indicate a significant step forward toward hybrid integration and photonic packaging for complex devices with high-density electrical interconnects,” concluded the authors, adding that the the next step would be to combine the flip-chip bonding concept with high-density optical interconnects.
Photon IP’s latest fundraising round follows an initial investment by Vigo Ventures in 2021, with the firm saying it has agreed contracts with pioneering customers around the world, and is now testing its first products.
Founded in 2020, the firm has also benefited from a €2 million grant from the European Innovation Council. It is currently hiring, with listed vacancies in project management, and for senior photonics engineers.
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