Swiss photonic foundry Lightium raises seed funding

Business news | September 20, 2024

By Peter Clarke

Photonics startup Lightium AG (Zurich, Switzerland) has raised US$7 million in seed funding to help create a thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic IC foundry service.

The company said that photonic circuits, such as those it will manufacture for customers, can achieve higher data transfer rates than electronic circuits at lower power and can therefore contribute to mitigating the power consumption of AI-oriented data centers.

The company is transferring its TFLN process to a commercial CMOS fab and has strategic partners already engaged in a “beta-run” Lightium said, without revealing the name of its host facility.

The company was founded in 2023 by Amir Ghadimi, Frédéric Loizeau, and MIT professor and serial entrepreneur Dirk Englund, Lightium claims it is the first company to be able to design and manufacture TFLN-based photonic chips at an industrial scale. The funding round was led by Vsquared Ventures and Lakestar.

Use less lithium

TFLN, a glass-like material, enables a significant boost in transmission rates and reduces power consumption compared with silicon-based PICs. This means data rates of 1.6 or 3.2 terabits per second for customers while reducing the environmental impact and cost of their ever-growing digital consumption, Lightium said. However, TFLN is one of the most difficult materials to process and has, up to now, been restricted to prototyping in academic and R&D settings. Lightium is now offering a proprietary manufacturing process geared towards volume production. The use of thin-films is preferable to working with bulk lithium-niobate as it requires less lithium which has become an expensive resource.

The TFLN platform is also applicable to other applications such as satellite communication, quantum computing, novel optical computing architectures, and lidar.

Lightium said it would use the funds to enhance manufacturing, design and testing capabilities and optimize its process design kit (PDK).

What fab?

The company was awarded a grant of 2.67 million Swiss Francs (about US$3.1 million) by InnoSuisse, the Swiss innovation agency, earlier in 2024. That funding was given so that Lightium could transfer its manufacturing process to a commercial CMOS fab to enable volume production.

Ghadimi, who serves Lightium as CEO, had previously developed PIC foundry services by running lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) for high speed (100GHz) electro-optics and non-linear applications at the CSEM research institute in Neuchatel, Switzerland. A silicon-nitride platform was also developed there to offer the integration of various mechanical and chemical transducers for vibration, acceleration and force sensing as well as bio-sensing.

Luxintelligence is a separate company associated with CSEM offering lithium-niobate foundry services.

It is possible that Lightium is working with X-Fab Silicon Foundries. X-Fab has been leading the European Union funded PhotonixFAB project with the aim of offering access to both low-loss silicon nitride (SiN) and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) based photonics platforms with indium phosphide (InP) and lithium niobate (LNO) heterogenous integration capabilities.