Image credits: iPronics
Valencia-based iPronics, a company pioneering photonic computing, announced on Wednesday that it has secured €3.7M in an investment round led by Amadeus Capital Partners. Caixa Capital Risc also participated in the round.
The company says the latest capital will help it to expand its engineering team and in product development to bring the Field Programmable Photonic Gate Array (FPPGA) chip to market.
iPronics, a spinoff of the Technical University of Valencia and beneficiary of an EIC Transition Grand, had earlier raised €1M in funding from co-founder and tech entrepreneur Inaki Berenguer.
What does iPronics solve?
Emerging technology trends in autonomous vehicles and LIDAR, 5G signal processing, drug discovery, and others require much faster, more flexible, and power-efficient computation.
Even though advanced electronic chips like GPUs, TPUs, or FPGAs have increased their capabilities, they still cannot keep up with performance requirements, says the company.
Computational photonics (i.e., photonic chips) is becoming the solution, thanks to lower latency, lower power consumption (photons/light consume less energy than electrons), higher bandwidth, and higher density.
“We know that photonic computing is the answer to many of the bottlenecks of new killer applications, but designing and building one photonic chip for each of those applications is not practical,” says Prof. Jose Capmany, Fellow of the IEEE and Optical Society of America, and co-founder of iPronics.
iPronics: What you need to know
The Spanish company developed a new generation of photonic circuits where standard hardware can be programmed using software for various applications through a mesh of on-chip waveguides and tunable beam couplers.
The chip can also be reconfigured and used for new commercial applications with a lower total cost, risk mitigation, lower power consumption and latency, and quicker computational speed.
Prof. Jose Capmany says, “Reconfigurability of photonic chips with software is the answer.”
The company has developed seven technology patents and published at least four seminal papers in Nature.
Amelia Armour, Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners, says, “As long-term investors in disruptive chip design technology, we are excited to back the team that pioneered the concept of programmable photonics and first demonstrated it in the lab. We look forward to helping the team to bring the chip to market at scale”.
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