Spain-based iPronics, a photonic computing firm, that has developed a general-purpose photonic processor that can be reconfigured by software, recently announced a €3.7 million investment which was spearheaded by Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Caixa Capital. Computational photonics has become a crucial part of the emerging technology trends such as autonomous vehicles and LIDAR, 5G signal processing, deep learning and AI, cyber security, DNA sequencing, and drug discovery which require flexible, fast and power-efficient computation. As much as advanced processing chips, GPUs, TPUs or FPGAs have developed, they are unable to match the performance requirements, this is where computational photonics comes in and claims to provide lower latency, lower power consumption, higher bandwidth, and higher density since photons require less energy as compared to electrons.
iPronics’ new generation of photonic processors can be programmed using software for multiple applications via a mesh of on-chip waveguides and beam couplers. The feature to reconfigure the chip has potential commercial applications and can cut the time to market, thus reducing costs and mitigating risks.
“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,” explained Prof. Jose Capmany, Fellow of the IEEE and Optical Society of America, and co-founder of iPronics. “Reconfigurability of photonic chips with software is the answer.”
Amelia Armour, Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners, added, “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”.
The list of strategic investors includes technology leaders and entrepreneurs from Google, Facebook, Carto, Freshly, Endeavor, Oracle, Deloitte, Ferrovial, Clicars and others. The company had also received €1 million in funds from co-founder Inaki Berenguer.
