Technology


Midlands start-up gets £3.8m to commercialise low-power alternative to AESAs


University of Birmingham tech spin-out, KVector, has raised £3.8m to commercialise its beam-steered antenna. Te design promises the performance of an active electronically-scanned array (AESA) but without the electronics that make it heavy, expensive and power hungry. Te finance round comes from Midlands


Mindforge, the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II, the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (UKI2S) and the University of Birmingham, and includes £950,000 from Innovate UK. “Antennas are oſten the single biggest


constraint on radar and communications systems. KVector’s technology promises a genuine leap forward, redefining what radar and communications systems can do. Tis is a British invention, born out of a British university, and we’re excited to help bring it to market,” said Tomas Storey, Investor at Future


KVector promises cheaper beam steering for communication and radar applications


Planet Capital National that manages UKI2S. Today’s AESAs use thousands of individually controlled electronic components to steer


the beam. Tis makes them expensive, heavy and using a lot of power, which limits their application. KVector’s patented approach replaces the


electronics stack with engineered metamaterial surfaces within an electro-mechanical structure, improving RF transmission efficiency whilst reducing power draw, weight and design complexity. Te technology can be tuned across a wide range of frequencies, putting it within reach of many applications. Te UK is well known for its metamaterials


research, including the work at the University of Birmingham behind KVector’s antenna. Te funds KVector received will be used for recruitment and to develop a range of radar and communications products in collaboration with its existing partners in the defence sector.


US company, Thintronics, creates substrate technology for the terabit era


US company Tintronics has created a Tintronics-on-Substrate platform to address the high performance yet low power needs of next-generation data-intensive applications, such as AI-enabled data centres. Tintronics says that the dielectric layer


separating copper interconnects inside a chip package has traditionally always been treated like “plumbing”. But as data centres head toward 448Gbps per lane to keep pace with AI workloads, that assumption is breaking down. Te decisive constraint on performance is no longer how small a transistor can be, but how to connect an ever- growing number of these transistors to one another and the chemistry behind it. Te chemistry dominating advanced


substrates today was largely set around 1999, when packages were small, traces short, and signalling speeds modest, conditions that no longer hold. Tese functions already pushed the printed circuit board toward lower-loss


chemistries as signal speeds rose. From the perspective of distance, frequency and density of connections, a signal crossing a substrate at 448Gbps behaves nothing like one crossing it a decade ago; the underlying chemistry was never built to handle such speeds. Today, the substrate is less of a passive, incidental layer, and more of an active design constraint, and one that does the real engineering work. Te dielectric challenge isn’t confined


to one point in the stack, either. Te same electrical requirements emerge in the layers built directly on the silicon die, IC packaging substrates and the PCB. Each tier has its own separate supply chain and electrical behaviour, so a signal moving from die to board crosses several of these layers, with each adding to the overall loss and complicating the design. Tintronics’s insight is that it has now


arrived at the substrate itself, demanding a step change rather than incremental


04 October 2026 www.electronicsworld.co.uk


tuning. Te company believes a single chemistry adapted across every tier could help engineers resolve loss and design characteristics for the entire system rather than reconciling several layers. Tis is why it introduced the Tintronics-on-Substrate platform, offering faster, more reliable, more energy-efficient data movement across the whole interconnect path and not just one layer of it. Tintronics-on-Substrate is the company’s


first high-performance, ultra-low-loss substrate dielectric film that shows 50% better insertion loss at 224G and 448G over traditional solutions, a 42% cut in SerDes power consumption, and 17% reduction in overall AI data-centre energy usage. Te solution has received backing from


the US Department of Commerce and the CHIPS Research and Development Office. incentives under the US CHIPS and Science Act.


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