INSIGHTS / News

Scale-Up Member, Wave Photonics, is developing a solution that will accelerate and streamline integrated photonics design in the supply chain.

Integrated quantum photonics is a scalable technology used in quantum computing, sensing, random number generation and communication. Currently, designers spend a lot of time and effort developing their own custom, high-performance components, but limitations on fabrication mean devices perform differently to the ideal design, affecting performance. Variations in production also lead to high-costs and long development times.

Wave Photonics is developing tools to automatically account for process imperfections and develop high-quality, robust libraries of components to enable photonic chip designers to rapidly develop and scale their products. Utilising computational techniques, it has developed a software tool to predict the performance and variation of a component for a given fabrication process and an optimiser to generate a foundry-specific component library.

The Cambridge-based start-up hopes that its technology will enable businesses making integrated photonics products to increase efficiency and avoid redundancy.

Wave Photonics is currently leading a £470k Innovate UK project alongside Cardiff University, Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult and SETsquared Bristol member, KETS Quantum Security. KETS Quantum Security will also be providing input as a potential end user of Wave Photonics’ technology.

This feasibility study will investigate using a computational approach to design a library of readily-available components in a way that can be moved to different fabrication processes, aiming to enable the development and scale-up of quantum technologies.

Wave Photonics CEO, James Lee said “2022 is going to be an exciting year and we look forward to developing our technology further to enable businesses making integrated photonics products to increase efficiency and avoid redundancy. We aim to make optimised components a standard offering from photonics foundries and our platform will provide optimised designs and streamlined integration between the supply chain.

“Our solution has the potential to not only benefit datacomms and quantum computing and communications, but also healthcare, biosensing and lidar. The feasibility project will enable us to make the most of the team’s background in quantum photonics and computational optimisation to not only develop a quantum photonic PDK at the target foundry, but also develop the core tools to expand to other fabrication processes in an efficient way.”