Harvard spin-out HyperLight, a developer of thin film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic integrated circuits, has raised $37 million to speed up the development of products for data centre optical communications.
The news follows that of Swiss photonics start-up Lightium, which recently raised $7 million to accelerate the commercialisation of its TFLN chip foundry services.
The technology overcomes the technical challenges faced by semiconductor-based interconnects in data centres at greater transmission rates.
“We believe TFLN will be the photonics platform of the future,” said Peter Chung of Summit Partners, which led HyperLight’s recent series B funding round.
TFLN overcomes issues of semiconductor-based interconnects
While great strides have been made in making GPUs more powerful, a critical gap remains in optical interconnects’ data transmission speed and power efficiency.
Semiconductor-based interconnects, widely used today, face significant technical challenges beyond 800Gb/s, falling short of the speeds needed to manage the exponential growth in data.
Founded in 2018, Hyperlight developed new fabrication technologies to create waveguides that look like silicon, but provide more efficient electrooptic modulation and a very low optical loss.
HyperLight uses DFB lasers for integration with thin-film lithium niobate because of their low cost, small footprint, and large output powers exceeding 100mW.
“We are very excited to be a part of this remarkable demonstration of the hybrid integration capability of the thin-film lithium niobate platform with other critical optical components,” said CEO Mian Zhang, a past Electro Optics Photonics100 Honouree.
The firm produces PICs based on its production-grade TFLN platform for customers in the optical communications, industrial equipment, and emerging photonics markets. It plans to scale product development with the new financing.
One of HyperLight's existing products, its TFLN transmitter (Tx) PICs, enable speed and energy efficiency for data center and telecom components and system integrators. As a drop-in replacement of existing silicon photonics or InP transmitter solutions, they achieve up to 40% power savings at the system level.
The TFLN PIC designs enable simultaneous CMOS-level voltage, 200GBd symbol rate, and low insertion loss at high production volumes.
“In a short time, the company has evolved this critical technology into market-ready products with a production-ready supply chain,” added Chung.
The funding round included participation from existing investors Xora Innovation, a deep tech venture fund backed by Temasek, and Foothill Ventures. Peter Chung, Managing Director and CEO of Summit Partners, will join HyperLight’s Board of Directors.
