- Tell us about your project!
Scintil Photonics was founded to develop and commercialize a technology for integrating lasers onto silicon integrated circuits developed by Leti and IRT Nanoelec. This technology brings enormous potential for innovation, especially in optical communications. More importantly, it is compatible with commercial silicon microelectronics foundries. This is crucial, because our vocation is to remain fabless. We want to stay focused on our core business, which is designing and testing high-added-value, fully integrated photonic circuits. In other words, our circuits integrate all of the necessary optical communication components (lasers, modulators, photodetectors, and resonant filters).
- What was IRT Nanoelec’s role in starting the company? What is your relationship to IRT Nanoelec today?
Over the past few years, IRT Nanoelec has helped bring integrated circuit fabrication and testing technologies to maturity. With some of the most advanced fabrication and testing equipment anywhere, IRT Nanoelec will be a key partner for our company moving forward.
- What is the outlook for the technology? What are some of the practical applications you plan to target?
Our initial products—time to market is three to five years—will be integrated circuits for datacenters, mainly for optical communications between racks (switches or servers) at speeds ranging from 800 Gbit/s to 1,600 Gbit/s.