PNO INNOVATION SPAIN PARTICIPATES IN THE HORIZON EUROPE PROJECT PHOENIX

The PHOENIX project, with a duration of 3 years, began on the 1^st September 2022

Project Partners Lumiphase (CH), Optalysys (UK), IBM Research (CH and IL), Nanophotonics Technology Center – Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) (ES), and PNO Innovation (Spain), coordinated by KUL (BE) will collaborate during the next 3 years to create building blocks for the next generation of encryption and computing hardware. They will leverage compact photonic integrated circuits (PIC) offering a continuous and efficient control over optical signals. The PIC chips are based on Lumiphase’s proprietary technology, and enhanced with novel functionalities using materials developed at KUL and UPV. Epitaxial technology will be advanced through the realization and upscaling of high-quality oxide thin-films. The developed technology will be used to demonstrate its benefits in four high-impact emerging applications:

1) fully homomorphic encryption (Optalysys, IBM Research),

2) 5G infrastructure (Optalysys),

3) inference of deep neural networks (IBM Research), and

4) training of deep neural networks (IBM Research).

The project has four main objectives:

a) to provide novel photonic technologies with enhanced functionalities thanks to the integration of VOx and BTO,

b) to provide a BTO/SiN waveguide platform for subsequent manufacturing of PICs and an upgraded version of such a platform integrating VOx with the potential to improve their performance and scalability,

c) to build up the demonstrators, and

d) to advance in the understanding, realization and upscaling of high-quality oxide thin-films by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) on large area

The validation of the developed technologies will be completed with an extrapolation to benchmark against representative existing systems and a roadmap for photonic-electronic integration. The project will perform a market analysis and a techno-economic evaluation to define business models and exploitation plans that ensure the sustainability of the PHOENIX platform to reduce innovation-to market-time and R&I costs for disruptive high-tech SMEs and maximize the impact of the 4 user cases demonstrators.