Wave raises £4.5m to boost light-based chip production
The UK-based firm is working on a scalable process for making on-chip photonics designs for quantum technologies, sensors and data centre applications.
Wave Photonics, located in Cambridge, secured the funding from The UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund and Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, with participation from Redstone QAI Quantum Fund, Kyra Ventures, Parkwalk's University of Cambridge Enterprise Fund IX (UCEF IX), and Deep Tech Labs. The investment takes the company’s total funding to date to £5.4 million.
Photonics has immense promise for improving the processing power of semiconductors. It involves processing information not with electrons, but with light photons. The core problem with the tech is finding an efficient way to manufacture the chips at scale. This is the problem Wave Photonics is trying to solve.
It says the new investment will help it take its technology from a research to manufacturing at a commercial foundry, with a particular focus on solutions for frontier applications such as quantum technologies and biosensing.
James Lee, CEO of Wave, said “The team has spent the past few years building and experimentally validating our design technology – it’s exciting to have the resources to begin deploying it to solve real industry problems.”