How LIGENTEC Spent Its EIC Accelerator Grant on Photonic Chips

LIGENTEC, a 2016 spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), makes photonic chips that guide light through thick silicon nitride rather than silicon, a material it sells on low losses and high power handling. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's cut-off of 8 January 2020 the European Commission selected the company, then registered as LiGenTec SA in Ecublens, for a grant-only award for SPECTRA, "Scaling All Nitride Photonic Integrated Circuits for future markets". The list names no other beneficiary for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,875 towards a total cost of €3,571,250, from 1 September 2020 to 31 January 2024.

The plan was to take a process that worked for prototypes and make it ready for volume. By the end of the project LIGENTEC's process was running on 200 mm wafers in X-FAB's fab in Corbeil-Essonnes, south of Paris. That part is well documented. The customers the proposal said were ready to move to volume production in 2022 and 2023 have not been named.

Where LIGENTEC Stands Now

LIGENTEC is active. The Swiss commercial register Zefix lists LIGENTEC SA as existing, with Fiduconsult Lausanne as its auditor and no insolvency or liquidation entry. Its last publication in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce (SHAB/FOSC), on 15 August 2022, records the change of name from LiGenTec SA, an ordinary capital increase to CHF 108,799, the exit of co-founder Tobias Kippenberg from the board and the arrival of Françoise Chombar, co-founder of the Belgian chipmaker Melexis. North Data shows the same entries and lists 6 European patent filings in 2024 and 7 in 2025.

On 18 September 2026, at the ECOC conference in Malaga, the company marked ten years in business and announced a platform that adds thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) modulators and III-V photodetectors to its silicon nitride chips. It claims modulation bandwidths above 100 GHz at drive voltages under 2 V and propagation losses below 1 dB per metre. These are company figures; no independent measurement has been published. In February 2026 the Vaud innovation agency Innovaud gave LIGENTEC its Scale-Up Vaud label for the second year running, according to the company's newsroom.

The Technology: Silicon Nitride Instead of Silicon

A photonic integrated circuit (PIC) does with light what an electronic chip does with electrons: it guides, splits, filters and combines signals on one small chip. "PICs based on silicon waveguides have been around for more than 20 years", LIGENTEC wrote in a Swissphotonics article quoted in its newsroom, while other material platforms arrived in the past decade. The company says silicon nitride is transparent from visible wavelengths to 2.5 µm, and it markets its chips on low propagation loss and high power handling, which its X-FAB partner announcement in eeNews Europe described as "unprecedented low propagation losses and high-power handling". The applications it lists are LiDAR, metrology, coherent communications and quantum computing.

LIGENTEC's process grew out of Tobias Kippenberg's nonlinear optics laboratory at EPFL, according to Bits&Chips. In 2019 the company said it could deposit nitride films from 100 nm to 2,500 nm thick and that this cut cost fourfold against thin-film approaches, according to Semiconductor Today. Its main platform is called AN800. LIGENTEC does not own a fab: it designs the process, supplies design kits and prototype runs, and has the wafers made at X-FAB.

What SPECTRA Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective says the technology had reached technology readiness level 7 and that "first customers are ready to enter volume manufacturing in 2022/2023". It put LIGENTEC's serviceable market in sensing and communication at €400 million by 2023 and €1.5 billion by 2027. By the end of the project the company was to have an industrial-scale platform for quantum, LiDAR and space; a validated quality control and metrology line; "certified reference designs to industry standards"; readiness to serve customers needing "up to 1'000'000 units / year"; and proven repeatability, yield and reliability.

The final periodic report, covering December 2021 to January 2024, states that the AN800 technology was fully transferred to X-FAB and that LIGENTEC processes are "commercially available in the 200mm line of X-FAB France". It reports a quality control line at LIGENTEC France with automatic wafer-level probing and DC electro-optical testing in ISO 4 clean room space, a process design kit updated to version 8.6, and ISO 9001:2015 certification. It also describes this as "the biggest European based PIC fabrication line with open access".

The production move is confirmed outside the report. X-FAB and LIGENTEC announced the partnership on 14 September 2021, with X-FAB's chief executive Rudi De Winter saying LIGENTEC had "the most mature offering for passive PICs", according to eeNews Europe. In 2023 the EU-funded photonixFAB project described the platform as "recently installed at X-FAB and now commercially accessible as 200mm wafer technology", according to PIC Magazine and Startupticker. The company's quality page lists ISO 9001:2015 certificates for both Switzerland and France.

1. Industrial-scale SiN platformDeliveredAN800 running on X-FAB's 200 mm line from 2021, confirmed by X-FAB and photonixFAB.
2. Quality control and metrology lineDeliveredWafer-level test line in France, per the CORDIS report; ISO 9001:2015 in both countries.
3. Certified reference designsPartialPDK 8.6 and ISO 9001 reported; no certified reference designs named. A statistical PDK followed in September 2026.
4. Volume customers, up to 1,000,000 units a yearNot shownNo customer in volume production has been named by the company or a third party.
5. Proven yield and reliabilityNot shownNo yield or reliability data published in the report or since.

The project ran to time against its own schedule: CORDIS gives one end date, 31 January 2024, and the report covers the period to that date. The weak points are the ones that would show commercial pull. The proposal promised customers ready for volume in 2022 and 2023, and three years later LIGENTEC's public customers are still described in general terms. Bits&Chips says they range "from metrology firms to lidar developers"; none is named as buying at volume.

Who Paid, and What the Company Discloses

CORDIS lists LIGENTEC SA as the only signatory and coordinator, with a net EU contribution of €1,893,150, and LIGENTEC France as a linked third party with €606,725. The French subsidiary was created on 1 October 2021, more than a year after the grant agreement was signed on 5 June 2020, according to the French company register's public database, which places it in the 10 to 19 employee band for 2024. LIGENTEC presented the French entity as an R&D centre close to its "strategic partner" in an April 2022 announcement on its newsroom. CORDIS does not show when the third party was added to the grant.

The pattern continued after SPECTRA. In the Horizon Europe projects LIGENTEC has joined, CORDIS lists LIGENTEC SA with a net EU contribution of €0 and puts the money with LIGENTEC France: €1,753,340.75 in photonixFAB, €871,250 in the P4Q photonics-for-quantum pilot line that started in April 2026, €612,500 in femto-iCOMB and €180,734.23 in PHACTORY. CORDIS gives no reason for the split.

As a Swiss company limited by shares, LIGENTEC does not have to publish its accounts, and none are public. Revenue, profit and equity therefore cannot be verified. The company told Bits&Chips it has more than 80 employees, has grown 50% a year on average and is fully self-financed, and PIC Magazine repeated the growth rate and the self-financing. Both rest on the company's own statements. CB Insights tallies $8.78 million raised, but the rounds it lists are grants, a business plan competition and an accelerator programme, not a venture round. The EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all its pages, does not include LIGENTEC, which is consistent with a grant-only award.

Why Europe Should Care

Photonic chips sit under several EU priorities at once: data-centre interconnects for AI, quantum computing and sensing. In November 2023 LIGENTEC's chief executive Thomas Hessler was one of eight industry heads who asked the Commission for €4.25 billion over eight years to build a European PIC supply chain, warning that less than 6% of indium phosphide and silicon nitride PIC manufacturing was done in the EU, according to Holland High Tech and The Quantum Insider, which date the presentation 7 and 9 November respectively. The European Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, aims to build Europe's capacity in chip design, manufacturing and packaging.

A Swiss design house whose chips are made in France by X-FAB, a foundry group listed on Euronext Paris, is a small example of that supply chain at work. In January 2026 LIGENTEC and X-FAB widened their deal: LIGENTEC became the customer interface for X-FAB's XPH90 silicon-on-insulator photonics as well, and both said they would invest in scaling thin-film lithium niobate on 200 mm wafers. X-FAB's Rudi De Winter called it part of "a robust, industrial-scale high volume European photonics supply chain".

The Verdict

LIGENTEC has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.