Laser Chip Brings Multiplexing to AI Data Centers

As the bandwidth and power demands of AI data centers necessitate a transition from electrical to optical scaleup networking, one component has been conspicuously absent from the co-packaged optics arsenal: the laser itself. That’s no longer the case. Last month, Tower Semiconductor and Scintil Photonics announced production of the world’s first single-chip DWDM light engine for AI infrastructure. DWDM, or dense wavelength division multiplexing, transmits multiple optical signals over a single fiber - greatly reducing power and latency while connecting dozens of GPUs.