Avicena Launches Innovative LightBundle™ Optical Interconnect Platform

Avicena, a company based in Sunnyvale, CA, has announced its revolutionary LightBundle™ interconnect platform at the OFC 2025 event in San Francisco, CA. This new technology promises to deliver industry-leading power efficiency and density, harnessing the power of microLEDs for optical connectivity.

The LightBundle platform supports an impressive data transfer rate exceeding 1 Tbps/mm shoreline density. It enables ultra-high-density die-to-die (D2D) connections that extend over 10 meters while achieving remarkable energy efficiency of less than 1 picojoule per bit. This innovation is particularly aimed at scaling up artificial intelligence (AI) networks, allowing for substantial GPU clusters to operate across multiple racks, effectively overcoming the limitations of traditional copper interconnects and significantly reducing power consumption.

Understanding LightBundle Technology

The LightBundle interconnect is crafted using a modular transceiver chiplet-based architecture. Each transceiver chiplet comes equipped with integrated microLED and photodetector (PD) arrays that connect with other chiplets via multi-core fiber bundles. This design supports dense, low-power D2D interfaces such as UCIe and BOW. Moreover, the LightBundle chiplet transceivers are adaptable to various packaging architectures, including co-packaged optics (CPO), on-board optics (OBO), and pluggable optical modules, as well as active optical cables (AOC). Unlike silicon photonics, the interfaces of LightBundle can be integrated on nearly any integrated circuit (IC) process from various foundries.

Bardia Pezeshki, Co-Founder and CEO of Avicena, expressed excitement about this launch, highlighting the platform's ultra-low power consumption and scalability. “Working alongside our hyperscale datacenter partners, we have tailored our technology to fulfill the growing demands of large clusters of GPUs in future scale-up networks. Our platform achieves shoreline densities surpassing 1 Tbps/mm while maintaining power efficiencies that are at least five times better than existing solutions,” he stated.

Importance of High Bandwidth and Low Power

The demand for high-performance computing in AI applications has been increasing rapidly. Enhanced AI models require interconnects that are not only denser but also more energy-efficient and capable of longer reach for both processor-to-processor (P2P) and processor-to-memory (P2M) connections.

Currently, most scale-up interconnects utilize passive copper technology, which limits communication reaches to about one meter, confining GPU clusters within a single rack. The LightBundle’s ability to extend beyond ten meters allows for the scaling of clusters that encompass hundreds or even thousands of GPUs distributed over multiple racks. At the same time, it significantly reduces the power consumption of these links, thereby mitigating challenges related to power delivery and cooling systems.

Avicena's Presence at OFC 2025

Avicena is showcasing its LightBundle technology at Booth #1956 during the OFC 2025 conference. The company will participate in several key events: Bardia Pezeshki is presenting at a workshop focused on the manufacturability of co-packaged optics, while Chris Pfistner, VP of Sales and Marketing, will chair a session discussing photonic interconnects in AI clusters featuring speakers from leading companies such as Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Meta.

About Avicena

AvicenaTech Corp. is a private company focused on developing next-generation optical interconnect architectures for AI, high-performance computing (HPC), sensors, 5G wireless networks, and aerospace applications. The LightBundle technology stands out due to its flexibility, ultra-low energy consumption, high bandwidth, and low latency. This crucial technology aims to facilitate the disaggregation of functions like compute and memory, thus enhancing system throughput and contributing to a more energy-efficient future.

To learn more about Avicena, you can visit their website.

Avicena, Technology, MicroLED