Silicon photonics transceiver developer Sicoya has won the European Photonics Startup Challenge at the Micro Photonics conference and expo.

The company received a cash prize of €4,000 ($4,300), a business coaching package worth €1,500 ($1,600) and various promotions in industry journals. The competition, part of the European outreach program Photonics4All, chooses eight finalists from Germany, France and Austria to give a presentation on their technology and business model to a judging panel consisting of photonics company leaders and cluster managers.

“Due to our technological achievements, we can lower the power consumption and reduce the costs of silicon photonics transceivers tremendously,” said Dr. Torsten Fiegler, business development manager of Sicoya. “This enables better interconnects and will enable a faster internet.”

Sicoya, a Technical University of Berlin spin-off, develops fully-integrated silicon photonics transceiver chips designed for server interconnects in data centers. Sicoya said it is on track to enter the market in 2017 with a 100-Gbit/s transceiver chip featuring integrated electronics and optics on a single chip.

“Sicoya represents an outstanding opportunity to invest in one of the worldwide leading activities in integrated photonics,” said Waldemar Jantz, a board member at Sicoya, “We are very proud to be able to support the company in what we believe will be a major step toward the next generation of high-performance integrated photonics.”