The first universal, programmable, multifunctional photonic chip
Researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de València and the company iPronics have reported a photonic chip that they say is the first to allow programming on demand and interconnecting of the photonic and wireless segments of communications networks
A team from the Photonics Research Lab (PRL)-iTEAM of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the company iPronics has designed and manufactured a chip that they say will be revolutionary for the telecommunications sector, datacentres, and infrastructure associated with artificial intelligence computing systems. According to the team, it is the first universal, programmable and multifunctional photonic chip in the world and is especially useful for communications, datacentres, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, satellites, drones, and autonomous driving, among many other applications.
This development 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.
According to the UPV and iPRONICS team, the chip they have designed and manufactured 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,” says Capmany. “It can implement the twelve basic functionalities needed in these systems and be programmed on demand, which results in greater efficiency of the circuits.”
The professor at the UPV, one of the international references in photonics, explains that applications such as 5G or autonomous vehicles require a higher frequency, which is why it is necessary to reduce the size of the antennas and associated circuits. In this case, the PRL-iTEAM of the UPV and iPRONICS report that they have made the converter behind the antenna, which is an interface chip, 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 processor, 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 datacentres and in the networks of computing systems of artificial intelligence,” says Daniel Pérez-López, co-founder and CTO of iPronics. “Our next objective is to scale the chip to cover the needs of this market segment.”
