
iPronics Programmable Photonics, a spinoff from the Universitat Politècnica de València, has been selected as one of the spinoff companies to watch in the frame of the first edition of the Spinoff Prize, sponsored by Nature,
the most prestigious scientific magazine worldwide, and the German multinational Merck
iPronics is making the computational power of photonics commercially affordable. iPronics processors share a common hardware platform that is reconfigurable by software. This cost-effective solution enables the same hardware to be applied to limitless commercial applications.
According to the company, current technologies based on electronic transistors are approaching the limits of their fundamental capabilities and programmable photonics is key to address the voracious appetite for bandwidth, flexibility and processing speed required by many emerging applications. Among these, 5G communications, data center interconnection, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, biosensors, autonomous driving, quantum computing and IoT stand in front.
iPronics approach combines the best of both worlds and is called to radically change the way in which information, communication and processing systems have been conceived until now, because it seeks to cooperate with electronic systems and not compete with them. On top of this it adds a disruptive nature by breaking the barriers of access and use of complex photonic chips. In words of its co-founders, in a few years this product will be ready to be used by anyone, regardless of his/her technical background.
Nature and Merck have 44 selected spinoffs that translate original, high-quality scientific research into products and services that address market problems and are well positioned to make a positive impact on society.
For iPronics, being on this list is a tremendous boost, even more so when the company has barely six months of existence, although the experience and professional career of the founding team comes from many years ago.