Lightmatter CEO: moving lasers onto 300mm silicon wafers to unlock optical interconnect
BenBajarin · x · 2026-09-25
Ben Bajarin launches an executive interview series with Lightmatter founder and CEO Nick Harris on optical interconnect and the future of computing.
- Industry consensus: accelerators need more bandwidth, and copper hits physical limits as link speeds rise and scale-up domains grow. Demand is the easy part; the hard question is how fast the supply chain can turn it into qualified optical engines at repeatable yield.
- Lightmatter's differentiated bet: most commercial lasers are still made on small indium phosphide wafers by a few suppliers; Harris argues for moving more of that work onto 300mm silicon using mature CMOS foundries—a different path to laser capacity.
- He also covers designing around the reliability problem of thousands of optical links in one system, and the shift from NPO to CPO.
Related event: Lightmatter CEO on Optical Interconnects: Lasers on 300mm Silicon Wafers(2 posts)→
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