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Netherlands breaks ground on photonic chip pilot line In this interview, Ton van Mol, Director of Flexible and Free Form Electronics at TNO, discusses the Netherlands’ new Photonic Chip Pilot Line and its importance for Europe’s photonics ecosystem. He explains TNO’s role in bridging research and industry and how the pilot line will help scale photonic innovations from lab to industrial production. He also highlights why photonic chip technology is critical for next-generation communications and computing, and how collaboration between industry, research institutes, and partners will strengthen Europe’s position in the global photonics market. 0:00 / 0:00

Recent Interviews

Netherlands breaks ground on photonic chip pilot line In this interview, Ton van Mol, Director of Flexible and Free Form Electronics at TNO, discusses the Netherlands’ new Photonic Chip Pilot Line and its importance for Europe’s photonics ecosystem. He explains TNO’s role in bridging research and industry and how the pilot line will help scale photonic innovations from lab to industrial production. He also highlights why photonic chip technology is critical for next-generation communications and computing, and how collaboration between industry, research institutes, and partners will strengthen Europe’s position in the global photonics market.

POET’s New 1.6T Hybrid Transmitter PIC In this interview, Raju Kankipati, Chief Revenue Officer at POET Technologies, discusses the company’s new 1.6T Hybrid Transmitter Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) and its significance for next-generation optical interconnects. He explains how POET’s hybrid integration platform enables high-performance, scalable, and manufacturable transmitter solutions to meet the rising bandwidth demands of AI and data-centre networks, and what this development signals for the future of high-speed, energy-efficient optical communications.

C-PIC promotes silicon photonics as a strategic UK priority Professor Graham Reed, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre and the CORNERSTONE Photonics Innovation Centre (C-PIC), the UK’s dedicated Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC) for silicon photonics (SiPh), at the University of Southampton, explains how the recent panel discussion at the Labour Party’s Annual Conference, titled: “How can investment in the photonics industry promote economic growth and sovereign resilience?”, explored the photonics landscape within the UK, underscoring its importance and opportunities for further innovation – with SiPh one of the sector’s fastest-growing areas, with a projected compound annual growth rate as a strategic priority for the UK.

CEA-Leti launches multilateral program to accelerate AI with MicroLED data links Vygintas Jankus, MicroLED Partnership Manager, CEA-Leti, discusses CEA-Leti’s launch of a multilateral program on microLED technology for ultra-fast data transfer, with a particular focus on accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) growth. The lab- to-fab initiative draws on the institute’s deep expertise in microLED process technology. Vygintas explains how supercomputers demand ever-faster communication links with very high energy efficiency and ultra-low latency, but interconnect performance is lagging behind compute power. MicroLED represents a true paradigm shift for short-range optical, point-to-point data interconnects, delivering extremely high data-density transfer rates with far better energy efficiency than current technologies.

The Photonics Breakthrough Powering AI Data Growth CCRAFT CEO Hamed Sattari shares how the company’s photonic chip technology is designed to handle the rapidly growing data demands driven by AI. He talks about CCRAFT’s recent funding, why thin-film lithium niobate is a breakthrough material, and how their chips could transform the performance of modern data centres.

La Luce Cristallina launches 200-mm BaTiO₃ wafer Alex Demkov, CEO and Co-Founder, and Agham Posadas, CTO and Co-Founder, both at La Luce Cristallina, explain how the company’s crystal-on-glass BaTiO₃ substrates, support growing demand from data centres, telecommunications, sensing, computing and integrated photonics markets with the 200-mm BaTiO₃ wafer offering better speed, a smaller size and lower power consumption than silicon photonics modulators while addressing the integration challenges of alternative materials. The company haas also opened a state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Austin, TX to expand capacity for wafer-scale fabrication.

EU Project ELENA positions Europe as a global leader in photonic chip manufacturing Hamed Sattari, ELENA’s project coordinator and CEO of CCRAFT, explains the outcomes from the recently concluded 42-month EU project, ELENA, sharing his excitement as to the development of the first-ever, European-made lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) substrates for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) - a breakthrough that establishes a fully European supply chain for thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) technology.

Polishing solutions to support PICs from R&D to volume production Al Cheswick, CEO of KrellTech, discusses the importance of precision polishing for achieving high-performance photonic chips and how the company plans to evolve its technology, incorporating more robotics to support the growth of the PIC industry over the next five years.

Record-breaking bandwidth of 1.1 THz for plasmonic modulators Stephan Koch from Polariton, a Swiss designer and manufacturer of high-performance PICs discusses the company's recent achievement of record bandwidth beyond 1 THz using state-of-the-art plasmonic modulators, and the benefits of this technology for datacentres, 6G networks, and ultra-broadband applications in wireless communication, sensing, and more.

Photonic processor promises 30x energy efficiency improvements Dr. Michael Förtsch, CEO of Q.ANT, discusses the company's first commercial product - a photonics-based Native Processing Unit (NPU) built on the its compute architecture LENA - Light Empowered Native Arithmetics. The Q.ANT NPU executes complex, non-linear mathematics natively using light instead of electrons, promising to deliver at least 30 times greater energy efficiency and significant computational speed improvements over traditional CMOS technology.

POET Technologies plans to ‘semiconductorise’ photonics Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman and CEO, POET Technologies, shares the company’s vision to semiconductorise photonics by integrating electronic and photonic components on the POET optical interposer to enable wafer-scale assembly – high volumes at a much faster pace and in a cost-efficient manner. Suresh explains the innovative and scalable platform solution that POET has developed with a particular focus on the role interconnect technology is playing to meet the growing demand of AI in the data centre.

Accelerating the photonic chip market in North America Jorn Smeets, Managing Director North America at PhotonDelta, the Dutch photoinic chip accelerator, explains the reasons behind the opening of a new San Franciso-based North America office, as part of an ongoing strategy to help grow the global photonic chip, or PIC, industry. Jorn shares his thoughts as to how collaboration between Europe and the US will help to develop a unified photonic chip industry, best placed to meet the challenges and opportunities which lie ahead across many applications, with the industry predicted to reach a $30 billion value by 2030.