Vodafone Announces Significant Cooperation with Two Silicon Photonics Companies

Recently, in order to promote the development and deployment of silicon photonics technology, telecom leader Vodafone plans to expand its workforce and announce the establishment of partnerships with European photonic chip developers iPronics and Salience Labs.

Vodafone plans to integrate photonic chips into its mobile base stations to achieve ultra-low latency, highly programmable, and more efficient networks. The company has identified these two optoelectronic companies as one of the first startups to collaborate on the M á laga expansion park in Spain.

Vodafone said that photonic chip integration will support and promote computing progress in fields such as generative artificial intelligence, network security and autonomous vehicle technology.

IPronics is a derivative platform of the University of Politicia de Valencia, which launched its first batch of programmable photonic integrated chips (PICs) earlier this year. The company's fully programmable PIC function is similar to a field programmable gate array. In March of this year, the company announced that it would list a "multinational telecommunications and electronics company" as one of its first customers.

Salience Labs, founded in 2021, is derived from the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester. The company is commercializing ultrahigh speed multi chip processors, which directly place photon processing maps on static random access memory. These chips are designed for mass production using standard CMOS processes.

While announcing the expansion of the M á laga campus, Vodafone also stated that it will expand employee recruitment - the base currently has more than 430 engineers and will add an additional 170 by 2025.

Source: OFweek