A team of UPV and iPRONICS manufactures the first programmable and multifunctional photonic chip on the market

VALENCIA, Apr. 14 (EUROPA PRESS) -

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 revolutionary chip for the telecommunications sector, data centers and infrastructure associated with intelligence computing systems artificial.

It is the first universal, programmable and multifunctional photonic chip in the world and is especially useful for communications, data centers, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, satellites, drones or autonomous driving, among many other applications.

The development of this chip is the main result of the European UMWP-Chip project, led by researcher José Capmany and funded with an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The work has been published in the journal 'Nature Communications', the UPV indicated in a statement.

The chip, designed and manufactured by the UPV and iPRONICS team, allows programming on demand and interconnecting the wireless and photonic segments of the communication networks, avoiding the generation of bottlenecks that can limit both capacity and bandwidth. available.

"It is the first chip in the world with these characteristics. It can implement the twelve basic functionalities needed in these systems and be programmed on demand, which results in greater efficiency of the circuits," Capmany highlighted.

The professor at the UPV, one of the international references in photonics, has explained that applications such as 5G or the autonomous car require a higher frequency, which is why it is necessary to reduce the size of the antennas and associated circuits.

In this case, what the PRL-iTEAM of the UPV and iPRONICS have achieved is that the converter behind the antenna, which is an interface chip, is as small and compact as possible, and that it is prepared to support current and planned future frequency bands.

"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 data centers and in the networks of computing systems. of artificial intelligence. Our next objective is to scale the chip to meet the needs of this market segment", highlighted the co-founder and CTO of iPronics, Daniel Pérez-López.