iPronics teams up with Ansys to accelerate development of next-generation photonic integrated circuits for AI and cloud data centers. The partnership combines iPronics’ design of fabrication-tolerant photonic components with Ansys’ multiphysics simulation tools. Engineers at iPronics now integrate Ansys solutions into their workflow for optical layout, packaging, and thermal simulations.
This integration enables robust design and validation of photonic integrated circuits that withstand fabrication variability. Such components support energy-efficient, low-latency interconnects critical for AI workloads in data centers. The collaboration addresses rising demands for reliable networking as data center outages disrupt applications.
Ansys gains expanded presence in the photonics sector through this production-grade customer use case. iPronics’ silicon photonics approach delivers programmable components that scale across hyperscale deployments. Traditional electronic interconnects face strains from latency, power, and scalability limits as AI models grow more complex.
- iPronics develops software-defined photonics for optical circuit switching with low latency, low cost, and low power.
- The company focuses on reliable, cost-effective photonic chip switching solutions for AI cluster communications.
- Ansys tools speed up iPronics’ development cycles and boost system reliability in optical engines.
- The partnership supports optical cores, electronics, and thermal packaging optimized for AI workloads.
- iPronics pioneers the first optical circuit switch to future-proof data center infrastructure.
“The scale and traffic demands of modern data centers require greater reliability through innovative networking architectures, systems, and components,” said Daniel Pérez López, co-founder and CTO of iPronics.
iPronics originated as a spinoff from the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain, where researchers founded the company in December 2019 to commercialize programmable photonics technology. 1 Co-founders Daniel Pérez López, who serves as CTO, Professor José Capmany, and entrepreneur Iñaki Berenguer drove early development, securing initial funding of €1 million from Berenguer before raising €3.7 million in 2022 to advance chip adoption. 6 The firm achieved a milestone in 2023 by shipping its SmartLight Processor, a reprogrammable photonic microchip, and recently closed a €20 million Series A round in January 2025 to deploy optical networking engines in data centers. 5 At the core of iPronics’ portfolio stands its optical circuit switching (OCS) technology, which operates in the optical domain to enable reconfiguration in microseconds while monitoring all ports in real time. 11 This approach cuts latency for AI inference tasks by bypassing packet processing and queuing, trims power use by up to three times compared to electrical switches, and supports transparent bandwidth across the O-band for scalable AI cluster communications in hyperscale environments. 11
