Quantum leap for PhotonDelta’s €1.1bn chip start-up & scale plan

PhotonDelta will receive €1.1 billion to advance semiconductor technology, funding the creation of 200 startups and expansion of production facilities. The investment, including €470 million from the National Growth Fund, aims to establish a new European industry centered around photonic chips, devices that transfer information using light and offer substantial gains in speed, cost and energy efficiency.“This investment is a game-changer,” says PhotonDelta CEO Ewit Roos, “it will make the Netherlands the home of the next generation of semiconductors.” The six-year program intends to build a globally recognized photonic integration supply chain with a wafer production capacity exceeding 100,000 per year.PhotonDelta will secure a strategic partnership with a foundry as a condition of the €1.1 billion investment, ensuring a reliable manufacturing base for the burgeoning photonic chip industry. This commitment addresses a critical bottleneck in scaling production and solidifies the Netherlands’ position in the global semiconductor supply chain, moving beyond research and development toward commercial viability. The investment’s structure prioritizes applied research directly linked to real-world applications.Researchers will concentrate on areas like innovative sensors for disease diagnostics, autonomous vehicle safety systems and improvements in food production efficiency, all powered by the unique capabilities of photonic chips. The program will run for six years and will enable PhotonDelta and its partners to further invest in photonic startups and scaleups, expand production and research facilities, attract and train talent, drive adoption and develop a design library.QuiX Quantum, a leader in photonic quantum computing hardware, is a core partner in PhotonDelta. “We are very happy with this news,” said Jelmer Renema, CTO of QuiX Quantum. “With this investment, the Netherlands can maintain and expand its position in integrated photonics, the technology which has enabled QuiX’ success.” The company’s reliance on photonic chips for its quantum processors highlights the symbiotic relationship between advanced chip technology and emerging fields like quantum computing, demonstrating the potential for cross-sector innovation, PhotonDelta says.By 2030, PhotonDelta aims to have created an ecosystem with hundreds of companies, serving customers worldwide and a wafer production capacity of 100,000+ per year. The collaborative nature of the investment extends beyond PhotonDelta itself, encompassing a network of 11 technology partners and 12 research and development organizations.Eindhoven University of Technology, University of Twente, of Technology, Holst Centre, PITC, CITC, OnePlanet, SMART Photonics, LioniX International, EFFECT Photonics, MantiSpectra, PhotonFirst, PHIX, and BRIGHT Photonics all contributed to the proposal submitted to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs & Climate Policy. This consortium has already collectively invested €171 million in promising photonics companies, including SMART Photonics, PhotonFirst, Surfix, MicroAlign, Solmates and EFFECT Photonics, demonstrating a pre-existing commitment to the field.Photonic chips offer a solution to the limitations of Moore’s Law, the observation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years. By using photons instead of electrons to process information, PICs can overcome the physical constraints that are slowing down traditional chip scaling.The reduced energy consumption of photonic circuits, a key benefit, addresses the escalating energy demands of data centers and internet infrastructure, which are projected to account for around 10% of global electricity consumption by 2027. This technology is important for achieving sustainability goals in the digital age. PhotonDelta currently comprises 26 companies, and the influx of capital will support the creation of hundreds more startups, researchers, producers and innovators.Photonic chips are one of the most important technological breakthroughs of the last decade. Source: https://www.quixquantum.com/news/photondelta-lands-eu1-1-billion-to-usher-in-a-new-generation-of-semiconductor-technology See today’s quantum computing news on Quantum Zeitgeist for the latest breakthroughs in qubits, hardware, algorithms, and industry deals.Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing.

For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.