At PIONEAR’s 7th General Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden, project partner Lumiary shared a major development for the project’s next phase. Starting in September 2025, Lumiary is partnering with Myfab and establishing a presence inside the Ångström Laboratory’s world-class cleanroom facilities in Uppsala, described by Lumiary as the largest facilities of their kind in the Nordics.
This collaboration marks a significant step forward in Lumiary’s product development journey and, as a result, for the PIONEAR project. PIONEAR is developing a novel photonic microphone technology designed to surpass the performance of current Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems microphones and move towards better-than-human-ear sound quality. The project’s technology is based on chromometry, using light to detect sound with very high resolution.
Speaking during the General Assembly, Andreas Lundström, Developer and Engineer at Lumiary, highlighted the progress made so far. He underlined the importance of Lumiary’s new collaboration with Myfab, explaining that it brings a lot of new avenues for us to make progress in the development of PIONEAR’s microphone.
Through Myfab, Lumiary will benefit from access to advanced micro- and nanofabrication infrastructure, specialised expertise and cleanroom-based capabilities. Myfab is Sweden’s national research infrastructure for micro- and nanofabrication and coordinates leading academic cleanroom-based nanotechnology laboratories across Sweden.
For PIONEAR, this access creates important opportunities to develop the next-generation lab prototype and to begin building scalable production methods. These steps are essential to support more extensive testing of the microphone technology and to move closer to industrialisation.
As Andreas noted, the collaboration opens “a lot of new avenues” for the team. With stronger fabrication capabilities and a growing presence in Uppsala’s advanced cleanroom environment, Lumiary is now better positioned to accelerate prototype development and contribute to PIONEAR’s long-term ambition: enabling a new generation of miniature microphones that can match, and potentially surpass, the sensitivity of the human ear.