Duality designs and manufactures photonic processors that redefine computing for the 21st Century. As a foundation for data processing, electronics is hitting its limits, struggling with performance gains, heat dissipation, energy inefficiency and rising fabrication costs, while moving electronic data costs more than computing it.
Built upon photonic chips, Duality’s processors natively transfer data and perform core computing kernels with massive speedups using less power and dissipating less heat. Forever beyond the reach of microelectronics, Duality’s processors will bring new discoveries to a world that is cleaner, safer, and better connected.
Duality can accelerate your development of photonic data processing, from design of component systems to full processing solutions, together with proven manufacturing and engineering support. If you want to learn more, then connect with us.
While silicon’s semiconductor properties propelled electronics and enabled the digital age, photonics requires fundamentally different material properties to reach its full potential. Duality’s processors are built on photonic chips in thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) which is a crystalline dielectric with excellent electro-optic, nonlinear, and piezoelectric properties.
TFLN chips allow Duality to design photonic processors with massive advantages over electronics. Efficient electro-optic modulation delivers high-speed programming at high bandwidths with low energy consumption and low heat dissipation. Smooth components support high optical transmission, and strong non-linearities deliver frequency operations and photon generation.
A chip design is a layout of connected components that accounts for fabrication tolerances, packaging, and electronic control requirements. Component performance is optimised through simulation of electromagnetic equations in full 3D space, which is prohibitively computationally intensive if not guided by experienced designers. Packaging and operation design optimises fibre-to-chip coupling over multiple channels to perform at ambient or cryogenic temperatures, vertically emitting grating couplers for chip singulation, or edge coupling for broadband operation.
Photonic chip manufacture follows many processes and machines from electronic chip fabrication, leveraging the T$ silicon chip industry. But contrary to advanced electronics, which targets nanometre component dimensions, the size of photonics components is related to the wavelength of light that they process, which is typically hundreds of nanometres. More powerful photonics processors can be manufactured without hitting the fundamental physics barriers that inhibit ever-denser electronic component packing.
Duality have developed wafer-scale lithography on 200mm TFLN wafers using deep-UV scanner resolution at < 180nm, with the option for specialist features at < 50nm resolution using electron beam lithography.
If your organisation is interested in using photonic chips to solve processing challenges, then connect with us.
