An Israeli integrated-photonics firm and a Flemish investor have emerged as the driving force behind the retooling of the former Belgan fab in Oudenaarde. Joining hands in Thema Foundries, the newly founded company plans to invest 200 million euros in transforming the site into a facility for the manufacturing, packaging and testing of photonic integrated circuits (PICs).
As reported by the Belgian newspaper De Tijd, one of Thema’s directors is Belgian financier Herwig Van Hove, who heads the Singapore-based investor group Vahoca. He’s joined by Yaniv Ben-Haim, CEO and founder of New Photonics. This Israeli fabless specializes in silicon-based optical connectivity solutions for data centers. It previously partnered with Intel, demonstrating a fully integrated optical compute interconnect (OCI) chiplet co-packaged with an Intel CPU.
Thema is reportedly backed by a group of European investors, but the required capital hasn’t yet been secured. Leading Flemish research players, including Imec and Ghent University, are supporting the initiative.
