Xavveo’s silicon photonics chips reach production
Xavveo, the Berlin deeptech building a new perception architecture, has confirmed that its proprietary silicon photonics chips are now production-ready.
Manufactured monolithically at CMOS scale, the chips give the company a manufacturable foundation for its formal expansion into drone detection, perimeter security and critical infrastructure, the dual-use markets it entered earlier this month.
The architecture spans three components:
- A transmit chip generates a 20GHz FMCW ramp and drives eight optical channels over a fibre interface.
- An RF CMOS receive chip runs twelve optical channels into a 150MS/s 12-bit converter.
- An 80GHz RF CMOS sensor unit integrates the power amplifier, low-noise amplifier, mixer and optical front-end.
Together they deliver lidar-like angular resolution below 0.1 degrees, ten times better than market standard, at one-fifth the cost of incumbent systems.
The chips were originally engineered to disrupt the imaging radar market used by L4 autonomous vehicles. Packaged with advanced GaAs power amplifiers and Xavveo’s antenna technology, the same architecture detects and classifies the small, cheap drones that conventional radar leaves exposed in the near field, identifying Class 1 drones, FPV platforms and low-altitude aircraft at 5 to 10km, distinguishing drones from birds, and separating individual drones within a swarm.
The milestone lands at a moment of acute demand:
Cheap, readily-available drones have become a central element of modern warfare and a major threat to Western defences, with Russia launching more than 200 drones a day into Ukraine.
Many slip through a near-field gap that conventional layered air defence leaves wide open, driving urgent investment in counter-drone capability across defence and critical infrastructure operators. The same architecture also addresses the long-term pull from autonomous mobility, where perception is the limiting factor on safety and scale, giving Xavveo a platform that spans two large and fast-growing markets.
Dr. Sven Otte, Xavveo co-founder and CEO, said: “Reaching production with these chips is the proof point behind everything we are doing. We are not building a marginally better radar, we are building a new perception architecture, manufacturable at CMOS scale and proven first in defence and protection. The same platform we designed for autonomous vehicles is exactly what defence and infrastructure operators need to detect the small FPV and spy drones their existing systems miss. Building this in Germany, at scale, matters: it is about securing the chip technology and the raw-material base behind a capability that is now central to national security and economic health.”
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