Integrated photonics company Rockley Photonics Ltd. will match government funding from the Engineering and Physical Research Council (EPSRC) to form a “Prosperity Partnership” with the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Center (ORC). “We are honored to have our technology and business endeavors supported and recognized by the EPSRC in this extraordinary funding initiative,” said Andrew Rickman, founder, CEO and chairman of Rockley Photonics. “Rockley Photonics and the University of Southampton team have a longstanding history of working together. Our partnership, built up over many years, demonstrates the value of relationships between academia and commercial enterprises such as ours. It gives us the ability to combine resources and academic excellence and focus on ground-breaking, early-stage technologies such as silicon photonics.” The money, totaling £4.8 million ($5.9 million), will be used to support research into how silicon photonics technology can be used to improve data center communication networks and support a new integrated photonics platform for broader mass market applications. “Research into this area is progressing quickly,” Rickman said. “In the very near future, this game-changing, disruptive technology will soon have a huge impact on the future architecture design of large data centers, improve the power and compute capacity of new consumer devices, and provide robust sensing solutions in a variety of industry sectors such autonomous vehicles and biomedical.” The EPSRC is the U.K.'s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences.