30 September 2024
Ffotoneg Ltd, together with collaborators, Cardiff University; SPTS Technologies Ltd, a KLA company; and lead partner Compound Semiconductor Centre Ltd, part of IQE plc., have won a £410k award from Innovate UK’s Improving and Scaling-up Semiconductor Manufacturing competition, announced 27 September 2024 – “£11.5m to improve semiconductor manufacturing and supply chains”.
This 12-month, £645k project, named Commodity High Performance InP lasers on a 6” wafer platform (CHIPIN6), will enable each partner to innovate towards offering compound semiconductor photonic solutions on the 6” Indium Phosphide (InP) substrate size. Areas of innovation include design, epitaxy, plasma etch technology and fabrication process developments. InP photonic chips are used as light sources and detectors in applications such as high speed datacoms and telecommunications, data centres, smartphones and displays, environmental and healthcare sensing, and consumer products.
Ffotoneg’s role in the project is to work closely with each partner and contribute to the design, epitaxy and fabrication processes to set up a 6” InP pilot line in South Wales. Ffotoneg is also in charge of drawing in potential future users of this pilot line, and so will be approaching companies and researchers across the world – if you are interested, please get in touch using info@ffotoneg.com
Today, the largest InP substrates in use in industry are 4” in diameter, with a number of foundries only moving from 3” to 4” in the last 3-4 years. With this ambitious project, the partnership will work to scale up the manufacturing of industry relevant photonic products for our customers on the 6” InP platform.
Located within an 8-mile radius, and with substantial experience of working together on collaborative projects, the partners are ideally placed to leverage existing supply chain strengths to deliver on this latest scale up opportunity in the heart of the world’s first Compound Semiconductor Cluster in South Wales.
Dr. Ali Anjomshoaa, Ffotoneg founder and CEO, said:
“With this co-funding from Innovate UK, we are able to overcome a number of significant technical and practical challenges in the setting up of a commercial, open-access, industry relevant 6” InP photonics pilot line. 6” InP material and processes are hugely expensive at this stage of development, and we would not be able to tackle these challenges without this award from Innovate UK.
We have a number of customer opportunities coming from fabless and non-vertically integrated photonics companies who are keen to use such a pilot line to scale up their manufacturing, improve yields and become price competitive. In addition, Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) using InP have large chip footprints that require large InP platform sizes to make them commercially viable.”
About Ffotoneg Ltd
Ffotoneg Ltd is a Compound Semiconductor Photonics start-up company set up in the heart of the Compound Semiconductor Cluster in Cardiff, South Wales, in 2023. Working closely with epitaxy and fabrication partners, our mission is to help our customers to make their designs and developments manufacturing ready and fabricate them in the UK.
About Innovate UK
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is creating a better future by inspiring, involving and investing in businesses developing life-changing innovations.
We provide targeted sectors with expertise, facilities and funding to test, demonstrate and evolve their ideas, driving UK productivity and economic growth. Join our network and communities of innovators to realise the potential of your ideas and accelerate business growth. Innovate UK: inspiring business innovation.