Author’s note: On top of our expert interview features we are also featuring executive interviews with top technology leaders exclusive for subscribers. We kick this off with Nick Harris the founder and CEO of Lightmatter, one of the private companies taking a different approach to how optical interconnect gets designed and manufactured. The full video and audio are embedded below, followed by an edited transcript for readers who prefer text.
We have spent the last several weeks working through the optical supply chain and the manufacturing steps that will set the pace of optical content inside AI systems. Demand is the easy part of the forecast everyone would adopt optical today if could be manufactured and was reliable at scale. The industry needs more bandwidth between accelerators, and copper hits a physical limit as link speeds go up and scale-up domains get bigger. The harder question, and the one we care most about, is how fast the supply chain can turn that demand into qualified optical engines that ship at repeatable yield.
In our inter interview Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris gave us a closer look at one of the more differentiated attempts to solve that problem. Most commercial lasers are still made on small indium phosphide wafers by a fairly small group of suppliers, and Nick makes the case that Lightmatter can move more of that work onto the 300-millimeter silicon base mature CMOS foundries already run. If that holds up at volume, it opens a different path to laser capacity. He walks through how the approach works and how Lightmatter is designing around the reliability problem that comes with thousands of optical links in one system.
He also gives his own timeline for when near-package and co-packaged optics ramp, which we found useful to hold up against our optical attach ladder, along with the reliability data Lightmatter has built up so far. As always, we would separate a product shipping from broad attach across deployed racks, and that gap is a big part of what we dig into with Nick Harris. The full video, audio and edited transcript are available to subscribers below.
Subscribers with CS Atlas access can deeper on Lightmatter and the wider optical transition. The Lightmatter packet breaks down Passage and Guide and places the company on our timing ladder from NPO through CPO and the longer-term photonic-interposer roadmap. A separate manufacturing section tests the 300-millimeter claim against the yield and qualification steps that still have to be proven.
Subscribers can then use our optical-solutions comparison and interconnect SWOT to see which companies control each part of the stack, how their products differ, and where they are focused across scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across networks. Each company entry maps the manufacturing unit it must scale and the evidence we need before moving its timing or competitive position higher.
For Subscribers
Full video interview
Why Lightmatter views interconnect as the problem that now sets the pace of compute.
How Passage and Guide address optical links from NPO through a photonic interposer.
How bonding indium phosphide onto 300-millimeter silicon photonics wafers changes the manufacturing approach.
Why reliability, optical test capacity, and foundry process control still govern scale.
Where Nick expects NPO, CPO, and photonic interposers to enter the deployment curve.