Lumiphase awarded for its breakthrough in data communication

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11.05.2022
Lumiphase team

The winner of the ZKB Pionierpreis Technopark 2022 is Lumiphase. Lumiphase’s optical semiconductor chips offer higher data throughput at lower cost and using less power than conventional silicon photonics chips. The start-up is already working with the key providers of optical communication networks.

Some 250 invited guests attended the award ceremony for the ZKB Pionierpreis Technopark yesterday. Lumiphase was able to convince the jury the most and secured the price worth CHF 98 696.04.

Lumiphase addresses a bottleneck in today’s communication technology: the link between optical data transmission and electronical data processing. The transceiver modules that perform the conversion from optical to electrical signals and vice versa are expensive, power-hungry, and have reached their technological limits in terms of speed. 

Lumiphase’s technology allows twice the data throughput of conventional silicon photonics chips at 30 percent lower cost and with 70 percent power savings. The key of the innovation is a material which has been known for decades but could not be produced in a scalable high performance process until now. Lumiphase’s innovation includes the manufacturing process for integrating thin layers of the barium titanate crystal into the established optical silicon photonics technology. What is more, it also involves novel designs of micro-meter sized optical components and complete circuits for communication chips.

The team is already working with the key providers of optical communications networks. The gola is to bring the Lumiphase chips into their products in the next two to three years. To be ready for market entry, the start-up is in the middle of setting up a supply chain that can actually produce millions of chips.

In addition to Lumiphase, LifeMatrix and Isochronic made it to the final. They received around CHF 10,000 each. LifeMatrix develops biomimetic implants for heart and blood vessel surgery. The implant degrades with time and natural tissue (e.g., blood vessels or heart valves) made of the patient’s own cells remains. Isochronic’s robot mechanism sorts out objects continuously (as opposed to conventional robots, which pick up one object at a time in serial order). The robots thus complete tasks many times faster than conventional robots and also require less space.

(Stefan Kyora)

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