Scientists Have Created The World’s 1st Programmable Photonic Chip

A pioneering collaboration between the Photonics Research Laboratory (PRL)-iTEAM at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and iPronics, a private company, has yielded the world’s inaugural universal, programmable, and multifunctional photonic chip. This groundbreaking advancement is poised to overhaul various industries, spanning telecommunications, data centers, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

The escalating demand for more potent silicon to train and execute advanced AI models has underscored the limitations of conventional electronics-based computing technology. Traditional electronic chips produce heat as a byproduct of electron flux passing through components like resistors, capacitors, and transistors. In large-scale applications such as AI and data centers, this generates substantial heat, necessitating significant power for cooling infrastructure, resulting in inefficiencies.

Enter the photonic chip, which employs photons or light instead of electrons to process information. Unlike silicon-based chips, photonic chips utilize optical components like waveguides, lasers, and polarizers. This enables faster information processing with minimal thermal effects and facilitates further miniaturization of chips.

Funded by the European Research Council, the collaboration between UPV and iPronics has produced a groundbreaking chip capable of on-demand programming and seamless integration of wireless and photonic segments. This chip removes bottlenecks, enhances capacity, and improves bandwidth. Professor José Capmany of UPV highlights that it’s the first chip worldwide to offer these characteristics, capable of implementing twelve basic functionalities required by modern systems and programmable on demand, thereby enhancing circuit efficiency.

“It is the first chip in the world with these characteristics,” said José Capmany, a professor of optical communications at UPV. “It can implement the twelve basic functionalities required by these systems and can be programmed on demand, thus increasing the efficiency of the circuit.”

Applications such as 5G and autonomous vehicles demand higher frequencies and smaller antennas and integrated circuits. UPV’s team has already made strides in this area by designing multiple components, including an interface chip that supports current and future frequency bands while maintaining a compact size.

iPronics has integrated this chip into its Smartlight processor, currently undergoing testing by Vodafone. According to Daniel Pérez-López, iPronics’ co-founder and CTO, this chip’s development represents a crucial milestone in addressing the efficient management of data flows in AI computing systems. The next objective is to scale the chip to meet market segment needs.

“For us, the development of this chip is a crucial 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 networks for artificial intelligence computing systems,” said Daniel Pérez-López, co-founder and CTO of iPronics in the press release. “Our next goal is to scale the chip to meet the needs of this market segment.”