Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV)

A public institution founded in 1971 and devoted to higher education and to research and development (R&D) activities. The main scientific and technological domains are information and communication technologies, electric, electronic, mechanical and chemical engineering, civil engineering, architecture, food and agricultural technologies, business sciences and fine arts. At present, the UPV academic community includes nearly 38,000 undergraduate students for 66 different degrees, more than 1,200 doctoral students, 2,600 teaching staff, 1,700 administrative and support staff members. The UPV runs its R&D policy towards two aims: on one side, it promotes its research groups towards major European research priorities, especially within the European R&D Programmes. On the other hand, it has a special vocation to perform R&D of interest to our industrial environment.
The Nanophotonics Technology Center (NTC) at UPV is a Silicon Nanophotonics facility in Spain. The NTC has been created as the hub for scientific research, technological development and innovation (R+D+I) in the field of advanced optical technologies and photonic systems for telecommunication and computing. Its mission is to generate new knowledge in silicon Nanophotonics as well as to bridge properly the science-to-industry gap by creating fabless companies around that benefit from such unique infrastructure. The NTC is composed by scientist and engineers from several academic research group in Spain. Skilled scientists and technician coming from the Agere Systems, Pirelli Labs-Milano have joined the NTC providing professional fabrication services.
NTC is considered by the Spanish Ministry and the Valencian Council as a Singular Scientific and Technical Facility (ICTS), a unique facility which investment and maintenance cost are relative high in comparison to other R&D areas and whose importance and strategic character on research and / or technological development justifies its access and use (by at least 20% of its production capacity) to the entire R&D community and society as a whole. The NTC facility includes a 500 sqm clean room for 6 inches Si wafer processing that includes: lithography, dielectric and polySi deposition, thickness measurements, sputtering, etch and chemical cleans, ICP-RIE, RTA and full FMA lab..

ROLE IN PROJECT

UPV-NTC will be the coordinator of the project, ensuring the correct communication and coordination during the industrialization of the different building blocks in parallel. In addition, UPV will lead WP3 devoted to the improvement, fabrication and integration of the photonic integrated chips and cartridges. Within the value chain, UPV will manufacture and supply the photonic integrated circuits.

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