Lightium receives 7 million dollars for faster chips

Lightium has raised 7 million dollars in venture capital to advance the commercial production of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) made of thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN). According to its press release, Lightium is the first company to design and manufacture such TFLN-based photonic chips on an industrial scale. The Schlieren-based start-up was founded in 2023 by Amir Ghadimi, Frédéric Loizeau and serial entrepreneur Dirk Englund from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT).

With its new development, Lightium is addressing the problem that artificial intelligence is leading to an "explosive increase in data volume and unprecedented energy consumption" and that current semiconductor-based technologies are reaching their limits.

Lightium therefore offers foundry services for the more powerful TFLN chips on a commercial scale. The glass-like TFLN is said to be one of the most difficult materials to process. It promises customers data rates of 1.6 or 3.2 terabytes per second. But "what used to be restricted to academic and R&D cleanrooms is now accessible to and can be adopted by industry," says Lightium CEO Amir Ghadimi.

According to Steven Jacobs of Lakestar, one of the new investors alongside Vsquared, data centers could increase their speeds tenfold or more with the TFLN chips and at the same time reduce operating costs with lower energy consumption. This would "benefit the operators, their customers and the planet considerably". Further applications are possible in satellite communication, quantum computers, innovative optical computer architectures and LIDAR. ce/mm