The Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique (CSEM) has spun off CCRAFT, a company to commercialize the production of photonic chips. According to CSEM, it is the first production-ready company to sell integrated circuits based on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN). Registered last month, CCRAFT has been developing its technology at CSEM for six years. The team has been delivering photonics chips through a pre-commercial offering at CSEM using a 150 mm pilot production line for the past four years. CSEM CEO Alexandre Pauchard (left) and CCRAFT CEO Hamed Sattari inside CSEM’s cleanroom, holding a TFLN wafer. Courtesy of CSEM. “Our tight collaboration with CSEM allows us to move from pilot manufacturing to industrial production,” said Hamed Sattari, CCRAFT founder and CEO. The company said that it plans to install additional production lines in Neuchâtel to deliver 12 million chips per year by 2030 and capture up to 30% of the worldwide market. CCRAFT also provides a dedicated Process Design Kit (PDK) to support customers in the designing and testing of the microcircuits to be produced. The PDK contains a complete modeling of each component’s physical characteristics and performance to ensure that the manufactured chips behave as designed. The company can produce Multi-Project Wafers (MPW) containing up to 800 different chips per wafer, which can help clients speed-up the modelling and testing phase. “By leveraging CSEM's infrastructure and years of know-how and also Horizon Europe projects, CCRAFT can accelerate the time to production and could become the first company in the world offering industrial production of components essential to high-performance optical information processing,” said Bahaa Roustom, vice president of marketing and business development at CSEM . “This is a real opportunity for Switzerland and Europe to regain some sovereignty in an essential communication and computing technology.” CCRAFT’s TFLN technology combines more than 10 core process steps to deliver dozens of integrated optical components on an area no larger than a fingertip. Courtesy of CSEM. With the rapid growth of data, especially driven by AI, current technologies are hitting their limits in speed and energy efficiency. Although new architectures and faster electronic chips are being developed, the biggest challenge remains the conversion between light and electricity. Most existing platforms, such as silicon photonics or indium phosphide (InP), cannot deliver the leap in performance the market needs. Chips built with TFLN promise up to 8× higher speed and consume up to 10 times less energy than conventional optical components. “TFLN combines several key advantages: high electro-optic efficiency, low optical losses, a wide transparency window, optical nonlinearities, and compatibility with microelectronic systems,” said Sattari. “CCRAFT offers both monolithic chips, built entirely on a TFLN substrate, and hybrid designs that combine TFLN with silicon for easier integration.” Thanks to its excellent electro-optic properties and compatibility with modern chip manufacturing, TFLN enables ultra-fast and efficient data transfer and industrial adaptation. Beyond data communication, TFLN also opens new possibilities for applications in quantum technologies, advanced sensing, and space systems — thanks to its low optical losses, wide transparency range, and ability to work at standard electronics voltages.