SK Telecom will develop next-generation quantum cryptography communication technology through a large-scale research support program of the European Union (EU).
SK Telecom said on the 9th that it will implement and demonstrate a next-generation quantum key distribution (QKD) system as a project under the EU research fund Horizon Europe. The project is a multinational joint study with institutions in three European countries—Greece, Austria, and Germany—and will run for the next three years.
Horizon Europe is the EU's flagship research and development support program, with a total size of about 95.5 billion euros, or about 170 trillion won. In July last year, Korea became the first Asian country to join as an associate member, enabling it to receive direct support from European research budgets. Based on its technological prowess in quantum cryptography, SK Telecom became the first Asian private company to receive the research funding.
The core of this research is developing a QKD system based on "QPIC-AI." QKD is a technology that uses the principles of quantum mechanics to generate and distribute encryption keys between communication parties. If a third party intervenes in the communication process, the quantum state changes, allowing detection of eavesdropping attempts, and the technology is evaluated as having high security.
However, existing QKD equipment required assembling precision optical components such as single-photon light sources and interferometers as separate devices, resulting in large size and expense burdens. SK Telecom plans to use photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology to compress multiple optical components into a single small chip and combine embedded AI to develop technology that corrects optical states in real time in response to external environmental changes such as temperature and vibration.
Once chip-based design becomes feasible, not only miniaturization of QKD equipment but also mass production through semiconductor processes, reduced power consumption, and lower deployment expense are expected. This would lay the groundwork for quantum cryptography communications, which had remained in limited areas such as defense and finance, to spread to public, industrial, and general communication networks.
The project includes the National Center for Scientific Research of Greece, the Austrian Institute of Technology, and the German semiconductor startup SynoGate UG. SK Telecom is responsible for developing the PIC-based QKD system, applying AI, and building and verifying the testbed, while the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea will develop the optical system chip for the QKD transmitter and receiver.