// Photonic integrated circuits

Cryptography that runs on light instead of electrons.

A photonic integrated circuit puts optical components on a chip the way silicon put transistors on one: waveguides instead of wires, wavelengths instead of clock domains. We design PICs for one job, securing communications, and we are developing that work into a product we call H.U.G.0.

1. Why put cryptography on a photonic chip

The post-quantum algorithms NIST standardized in 2024 are heavier than the cryptography they replace, and the cost lands hardest on small, power-limited hardware: avionics, spacecraft buses, sensors, radios. The operations that dominate them, large matrix arithmetic and parallel hashing, happen to be the operations photonics does well. Light propagates through a waveguide computation at fixed, low power, and wavelength division lets many operations share one circuit simultaneously.

Photonics also offers something electronics cannot: physics-grade randomness. Photon-arrival statistics make entropy sources whose output no amount of computation can predict, which is the foundation any cryptographic system stands on.

Our research program covers both halves: quantum random number generation and photonic acceleration of the NIST algorithm kernels. The Research page states what we claim and what remains open. This page describes where that work is headed.

H.U.G.0

FIRST DIE: DESIGN COMPLETE

Hermetic Ubiquitous Guard Zero: a photonic security module designed to generate, protect, and serve cryptographic keys for the quantum era. One sealed part that gives a platform its entropy, its post-quantum operations, and its key handling, without asking the rest of the system to be trustworthy.

H · HERMETIC

Sealed packaging, for two reasons. Photonic components want isolation from humidity and contamination, and cryptographic components want a tamper boundary. One enclosure serves both.

U · UBIQUITOUS

One module design across platforms: aircraft, spacecraft, ground stations, racks. The power and size budget is set by the smallest platform, not the largest.

G · GUARD

The module's job: quantum entropy generation, acceleration of the NIST post-quantum kernels (FIPS 203/204/205), and key storage and service to the host system.

0 · ZERO

Zero retained state: de-energized, the module holds nothing to extract. Built for zero-trust architectures that assume the host is compromised — keys never leave the boundary unencrypted.

Status, stated plainly. The first H.U.G.0 processor die — the H.U.G.0 die, a 13.5 × 19.7 mm silicon-nitride photonic circuit — is design-complete and rule-clean in the AIM Photonics design kit. There is still no fabricated silicon, no availability date, and no FIPS 140-3 certification; a certification pathway for photonic modules is one of the open problems our research names. We publish the design because our investors and partners should see where the research is pointed, not because there is something to buy today.

2. Designed inside the U.S. photonics ecosystem

We do not own a fab, and we are honest about what that means: our PIC work is design, integration, and test, executed through the U.S. integrated-photonics manufacturing ecosystem. Our research partnership within AIM Photonics gives the work a fabrication and packaging pathway; our collaboration with UT Austin's Nanoscale Design and Manufacturing Laboratory addresses how photonic hardware gets made at meaningful cost and volume.

The same discipline that governs the rest of this site governs H.U.G.0: claims trace to documents, and the gap between design and product is stated, not hidden.

Cryptography that runs on light instead of electrons.

1. Why put cryptography on a photonic chip

H.U.G.0

2. Designed inside the U.S. photonics ecosystem

Building a platform that will need this?