TUPHO, the valorization project led by Hamidreza Neshasteh and Ivan Favero of the Quantum Materials and Phenomena Laboratory (MPQ), supported in 2024 by the DIM QuanTiP is now a winner of the CNRS Innovation RISE program.

RISE is a support program for the creation of deeptech start-ups run by CNRS Innovation. This year, eleven projects have been selected to benefit from the help of a mentor and teams of experts to best develop their business.

This is the framework within which TUPHO will evolve, for the large-scale production of integrated photonic circuits. This project is an initiative that aims to bridge the gap between upstream innovation and large-scale production in the photonic integrated circuit (PIC) industry. Although PICs have the potential to revolutionize fields such as sensing, quantum technologies, computing and telecommunications – by offering increased performance, reduced power consumption and lower costs – their industrialization remains limited due to very low production yields caused by manufacturing imperfections. Even if manufacturing dimensional errors are today only a few nanometers, they still need to be minimized down to the picometer scale to achieve functional device yields in excess of 90%. The TUPHO project tackles this critical bottleneck with a patented post-fabrication technique that permanently corrects manufacturing errors at wafer scale. This method enables photonic devices to be fine-tuned with unrivalled precision – to picometer scale and below – paving the way for large-scale production with high yields for the PIC industry.