SCINTIL was born of a collaboration between CEA-Leti (Sylvie Menezo) and the University of Toronto (Pr. Joyce Poon), aimed at improving a silicon integrated photonic circuit technology. After a successful demonstration of state-of-the-art silicon-integrated lasers, thanks to a thesis by Torrey Thiessen (now a SCINTIL employee), and the filing of several patents, Sylvie Menezo benefited from a CEA spin-off to exploit the technology. Winner of the Ilab competition in July 2018, she then teamed up with Pascal Langlois to create SCINTIL Photonics in November 2018.

Silicon photonics is a technology currently in production in large Microelectronics foundries and exploited since 2017 by fabless companies to ensure optical communications in datacenters (100 and 400 Gigabit/sec). This technology enables the integration of all the components needed for optical communication on a single integrated circuit (light modulators, waveguides, photodetectors), but it does not allow the integration of lasers, which is problematic given that 8 to 16 lasers are becoming necessary to ensure next-generation transmissions (1,600 and 3,200 Gigabit/sec). The integration of lasers, without modifying existing silicon photonics technology, is made possible by SCINTIL technology, using molecular bonding on the back of the circuits. This integration enables dense parallelization and improved performance, while exploiting the mature silicon photonics technology already in production at foundries.

SCINTIL's ambition is to become a benchmark supplier of photonic integrated circuits for optical communications. To achieve this, the company is aiming for the first pre-production runs within the next 18 to 24 months. In addition to optical communications, the technology is also attracting interest in sensor applications such as LIDAR.

SCINTIL Photonics is a fabless start-up that develops and operates a technology for photonic circuits integrated on silicon. Born at CEA-Leti in Grenoble, the technology is today the only one enabling the monolithic integration of lasers on silicon photonic circuits produced in commercial microelectronics foundries. Protected by 35 patents, it is manufactured by a SCINTIL partner foundry.

SCINTIL technology has been developed for the needs of the cloud (fiber optic transmissions at 1.6 and 3.2 Terabit/sec), and particularly for the deployment of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

To ensure product development and marketing, SCINTIL has raised funds twice, most recently for €19 million from the Robert Bosch Venture Capital investment fund. The company now employs around twenty people in Grenoble and Toronto. At the product development stage, it has three world-leading customers in its target segments. SCINTIL aims to go into production at the end of 2024, during 2025.

Sylvie MENEZO

is founder and President of SCINTIL. She previously headed the "silicon photonics" activities at CEA-Leti and held various development and management positions at France Telecom, Alcatel and Sercel-CGG. Menezo is a member of the ePIXfab Board of Directors and the Optical Fiber Communication Conference Technical Committee. Menezo holds an INSA Lyon engineering degree, a CNET PhD and an Audencia Executive MBA.

Pascal LANGLOIS

is co-founder and Chairman of the Board of SCINTIL. Previously, he headed Tronics Microsystems. He has held management positions at ST-Ericsson, NXP, Philips Semiconductors and VLSI Technology, and is a graduate of the University of Paris and the Stanford University strategy-organization program.