Why Interconnects Matter
Modern AI systems are bottlenecked not by computation, but by communication. As training and inference scale to thousands of GPUs and custom accelerators, data movement between chips, modules, and racks dominates total system power and latency.
Electrical interconnects — copper traces and SerDes — were never designed for this scale. They now struggle to move data fast enough or far enough without consuming massive power.
- Bandwidth has plateaued: Even at 112 Gbps per lane, copper links suffer severe loss and crosstalk, forcing more retimers and equalizers that burn power and add latency.
- Power dominates: Each SerDes can consume 10–20 W just to move bits across a few centimeters. In large AI pods, interconnect power rivals compute power.
- Scaling stalls: As chips multiply within a pod or rack, signal integrity and thermal limits make further scale-up inefficient and unsustainable.
This is the new bottleneck of AI infrastructure: the interconnect fabric. To unlock the next leap in performance and efficiency, the world needs a fundamentally different medium — light.
Our Technology
At LightXcelerate, we are pioneering native optical interconnects based on high-density micro-VCSEL and photodiode arrays. By bringing light directly onto the chip package, we eliminate the need for SerDes, retimers, and long electrical channels — enabling true die-speed optical I/O.
Our platform integrates optical transmitters, receivers, and packaging at wafer scale, allowing chips to communicate optically with minimal conversion loss. The result is a scalable, power-efficient interconnect fabric for the AI era.
Advantages
- 10× higher bandwidth density – massively parallel optical lanes at die-edge pitch.
- Up to 80% lower I/O power – photons replace electrons, eliminating equalizers and retimers.
- Lower latency – native, clock-synchronous optical paths between dies.
- Thermal and signal stability – optical links immune to EMI, crosstalk, and attenuation.
- Scalable architecture – extends from chip-to-chip to module-to-rack for wide, composable compute fabrics.
At LightXcelerate, we're building the interconnect fabric that lets performance scale with every chip added — data moving at the speed of light.