Enabling & Support
11/12/2025
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On 20 November, Lausanne-based Luxtelligence S.A. received an ESA Innovation Award during a ceremony at the Space Tech Expo Europe 2025 in Bremen, recognising its success in tackling critical barriers in integrated photonics that have long frustrated engineers working on everything from quantum computers to satellite communications.
The ESA Supplier Performance Award – which Britta Schade, Head of ESA’s Quality Department, presented on behalf of Dietmar Pilz, Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality – represents more than recognition of past achievements. It signals confidence in an approach that systematically removes key challenges around tunability, thresholds, and manufacturability.
Commercialising Breakthrough Technology
Luxtelligence is the first European company commercialising optoelectronic Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) using ferroelectric thin films that surpass the state of the art in photonics. The company is a spin-off from EPFL in Switzerland – a pioneer in this engineering field for over 10 years. Although similar activities in this field are ongoing in the US and China, Luxtelligence is the first company offering low-loss and high-bandwidth optoelectronics to the market. Along with ongoing technology breakthroughs (and IP generation), Luxtelligence possesses a strong and multidisciplinary team.
Optical communication is a strategic field for secure and high-capacity communication. Chip-based optoelectronics are essential for fibre optical interconnects, which could reduce complexity and increase data capacity for ground-to-ground communication. Free-Space Optical (FSO) communication, vis-à-vis ground-space and space to space links, are domains that can be directly addressed with the technology developed by Luxtelligence under ESA, NAVISP Element 1 and ESA Discovery funding.
With the current data demands, telecommunication and data communication infrastructures are moving from legacy platforms to innovative photonic chips that can do more with less technical infrastructure. Luxtelligence’s optoelectronic platform can break various bottlenecks in these domains and is of strong importance for optical communications in aerospace applications.
For example, they have shown close to 400 gigabit per second (Gb/s) data transmission using their chips, which is four times faster than the state-of-the-art in silicon chips. And Luxtelligence is industrialising their promising technology in a qualified European foundry.
Three ESA Discovery activities have supported Luxtelligence’s work to address the barriers that have kept advanced photonic circuits out of reach for space missions:
Luxtelligence’s award comes during a milestone year for ESA’s research and development activities. In May, the company contributed to the celebration of 50 years of ESA’s basic R&D activities in Florence – a gathering that highlighted how fundamental research investments mature into practical technologies over decades and brought together the architects of ESA’s most successful missions alongside the entrepreneurs building tomorrow’s space capabilities.
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