Investment flows into silicon photonics OpenLight partnering with Tower Semiconductor for high speed bandwidth as data centres face rising pressure from AI workloads.
US based start-up OpenLight Photonics secures $34 million in Series A funding to develop optical based interconnects rather than conventional electron based, that aim to ease bandwidth bottlenecks in large GPU clusters.
The company, is a spin out of Synopsys, develops photonic application-specific ICs or PASICs (Photonic Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), which integrate silicon with indium phosphide to move data using light rather than electrical signals. This allows interconnects in data centres to deliver higher bandwidth equivalent to speed of light and lower power consumption than copper-based connections.
The design integrating indium phosphide with silicon building modulators capable of 200Gb and 400Gb per second bandwidth speeds directly on-chip. The approach addresses network limits that restrict GPU utilisation in large-scale data centres.
With the manufacturing partner Tower Semiconductor, which validates OpenLight’s Process Design Kit containing lasers, modulators, detectors and amplifiers. Customers include semiconductor companies, networking vendors, hyperscale data centre operators and systems integrators.
Adoption timelines are set for 2025, when first customer production is expected, with revenues projected to begin in 2026. Adjacent applications in telecommunications, automotive, industrial sensing and quantum computing further broaden the company’s addressable market.
Standards bodies such as the Optical Internetworking Forum and initiatives in co-packaged optics are shaping the framework within which these technologies will operate. For investors such as Juniper and Lam Capital, alignment with this shift gives strategic as well as financial relevance.
