Founded in 2023, the Swiss engineering and technology company Lightium is dedicated to providing foundry services for mass-production-ready thin-film lithium niobate photonic chips. Leveraging proprietary manufacturing processes capable of handling mass production, Lightium offers customers rapid supply capabilities from prototyping to large-scale production, enabling the creation of next-generation photonic chips.
Lightium was co-founded by Amir Ghadimi, Frédéric Loizeau, and Dirk Englund. Amir Ghadimi, CEO, holds a PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from ETH Zurich and previously served as a Senior Specialist at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (SCEM). Frédéric Loizeau, Chief Revenue Officer, holds a PhD in Microsystems from ETH Zurich and previously served as Business and Technology Development Manager at SCEM. Dirk Englund is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence and products like ChatGPT has led to an explosive growth in data volume and unprecedented energy consumption. By 2030, data center data processing volume will increase 100-fold, consuming 10% of global electricity. Data centers primarily consist of large clusters of central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate computationally intensive tasks and transmit data between these processors at extremely high speeds via optical interconnects. While industry giants like Nvidia have made significant progress in improving GPU performance, key gaps remain in the data transmission speed and energy efficiency of optical interconnects. Currently widely used semiconductor-based interconnect technologies face significant technical challenges at speeds exceeding 800 Gb/s, reaching the physical limits of material performance and unable to meet the speeds required to cope with the exponential growth of data.
Due to the difficulty in meeting the demands of silicon materials, there is a strong market demand for alternative materials with superior electro-optical properties. These materials must not only meet stringent performance standards but also withstand the harsh environments of data centers. Thin-film lithium niobate is a material that meets the above requirements, but it is also one of the most difficult materials to process. To date, it has been limited to the prototype production of cleanrooms in academia and research institutions.
