Swiss photonics startup Lightium AG wants to help data center operators reduce their energy consumption while increasing performance after closing on a $7 million seed funding round.

Today’s round was led by VSquared Ventures and Lakestar, and the money will help Lightium become the first company in the world to design and manufacture photonic integrated circuits based on a new technology called Thin-Film Lithium Niobate or TFLN.

The startup says its TFLN photonics can be used to make more advanced semiconductor transceivers that overcome the bandwidth limitations of existing chip technologies while reducing energy consumption.

There should be big demand for such a technology, Lightium believes, as the rise of artificial intelligence has put data centers under enormous strain, with rapidly increasing amounts of data flowing into, and out of them. The company cites studies that show how data centers will handle 100-times more data by 2023, consuming up to 10% of the world’s electricity supply. Already, global data center resource consumption is said to be equivalent to the total energy usage of Japan, which ranks fifth in the world in terms of power consumption.

With its technology, Lightium aims to provide a superior way for the millions of central processing units and graphics processing units that reside in data centers to talk to one another, so they can work in concert to process compute-intensive tasks. Optical networking interconnects based on silicon photonics technology use lasers to transmit data from chip-to-chip at unprecedented speeds, easily surpassing the 800 gigabyte per second ceiling of existing semiconductor interconnects.

TFLN is a glass-like material that’s ideally suited for optical laser transmission, but until now the semiconductor industry has always struggled to manufacture it with acceptable production yields, Lightium says. As such, the technology has only existed in prototype form, used primarily for research.

Lightium says it has managed to solve the manufacturing challenges around TFLN, and claims it is now ready to crank up its proprietary process to enter volume production. When its technology becomes commercially available, chipmakers will be able to boost semiconductor bandwidth to data rates of up to 3.2 gigabits per second, while using less energy than before.

Lightium co-founder and Chief Executive Dr. Amir Ghadimi says TFLN is exciting because existing semiconductor transceivers have reached their limit, and there is no feasible way to make them run faster or more efficiently.

“We use TFLN to solve this problem and we have now developed the manufacturing capability to provide this technology at scale for the industry,” he said. “What used to be limited to academic and R&D cleanrooms has now become an accessible reality for the industry to adopt.”

The startup said one of the benefits of its TFLN platform is its versatility, which means it can be applied to other use cases besides data centers, including satellite communications, quantum computing, optical computing architectures and lidar systems.

With the money it has raised, Lightium plans to enhance its design, manufacturing and testing processes, optimize its process design kit for semiconductor makers, and move closer to wide-scale commercialization of its platform. It’s already producing TFLN photonics-based interconnects for a number of partners in closed beta, and aims to launch its foundry services early next year.

Vsquared Investment Manager Jakob Lingg said he believes there is strong demand among chipmakers for alternative materials with superior electro-optical properties.

“The problem is that these materials must meet strict performance standards and endure the harsh environments of data centers,” he said. “TFLN emerges as a promising solution, and Lightium will ensure TFLN interconnects can be produced at wafer-scale for practical and scalable applications.”

Lightium isn’t the only company working to commercialize silicon photonics technology. One of its major rivals is Intel Corp., which has been working on silicon photonics for years. It announced it had successfully manufactured an integrated optical compute interconnect, or OCI, chiplet, co-packaged with an Intel-made CPU, earlier this year, but has yet to launch any commercial products.

Other rivals in the space include Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., plus startups such as Ayar Labs Inc., Celestial AI Inc., Luminous Computing Inc. and IP Photonics Corp. IBM Corp. has also explored the possibilities of silicon photonics, though it hasn’t made any announcements for quite some time.

Assuming Lightium can fulfill its roadmap and start mass-producing interconnects by early next year, it should be in a position to emerge as one of the clear leaders in the industry.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer