Avicena Demonstrates 30m Reach of microLED-based LightBundle Technology at European Conference on Optical Communications

Frankfurt, Germany — September 23, 2024 — Avicena, headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, is showcasing the world’s first microLED-based 30 meter link at ECOC 2024 in Frankfurt, Germany, tripling the reach shown in its previous public demonstrations. Avicena’s LightBundle^TM microLED-based links provide superior bandwidth density, energy efficiency, reliability and cost compared to other optical interconnect technologies. Now, with a 30 meter reach, LightBundle interconnects can span a full row of data center racks, unlocking unparalleled performance from HPC and AI clusters.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving an unprecedented surge in demand for compute and memory performance. This requires ever higher density, lower power, longer interconnects between processors, and between processors and memory.

Today, there is a duopoly of high-speed interconnect technologies: Up to about 1 meter, electrical links dominate while laser-based optical links are the choice for longer distances.  Electrical interconnects are both cost-effective and reliable, while laser-based links are significantly higher cost and suffer from limited reliability.  “At Avicena, we are excited to showcase a microLED-based link with a reach of 30 meters after having previously publicly demonstrated 10 meter links,” says Bardia Pezeshki, Founder and CEO of Avicena. “At 30 meters these interconnects can easily cover a row of racks in a datacenter or the full length of a commercial vehicle like a bus in automotive applications.  With further optimization of devices and fibers, reaches of 100 meters or more could be possible with this technology.” 

“LightBundle links offer superior density, power efficiency, and cost compared to more conventional optical interconnect technologies, but are optimized for shorter reaches,” says Rob Kalman, CTO and Co-Founder of Avicena.  “Extending LightBundle’s reach from 10 to 30 meters opens up important new applications and shows that we are continuing to rapidly advance this exciting new technology.”

Scalable LightBundle Chiplet Platform for D2D Interconnects

Avicena will also showcase the greatly relaxed alignment tolerances of the LightBundle technology suite in their stand using standard LEGO^TM based components.  This underlines the fact that aligning LED-based optical links is truly “child’s play” compared to the tight tolerances of single mode based silicon photonics, enabling LightBundle to achieve much lower manufacturing costs and higher packaging reliability.

Avicena at ECOC 2024

In addition to showcasing its LightBundle interconnect technology at Stand B59, Avicena will participate in the following events:

Simon Richmond, VP of Operations & Jess Brown, Business Development will present at the Product Focus Session on the Exhibit Floor:
uLEDs – not just for fancy displays!  A new paradigm in ultra-low power optical interconnects for AI

September 23, 2024 — 2:50pm – 3:20pm

 Chris Pfistner, VP Sales & Marketing will also be hosting a panel at the Global Economic Photonic Forum in Malaga, Spain, the following week: 
China Panel – Discussion on China’s evolving role in the global photonics industry
October 2, 2024 — 9:40am – 10:55am

About Avicena

AvicenaTech, Corp. is a privately held company located in Sunnyvale, CA, developing LightBundle, a next generation optical interconnect architecture for AI/ML, HPC, sensors, 5G wireless and aerospace applications. This unique, flexible ultra-low energy technology is based on microLEDs, offering both very high bandwidth and low latency. Now, system designers can disaggregate functions like compute and memory and radically grow system throughput. Avicena’s technology is a key building block in the evolution of networking and computing that will reduce the energy impact on our planet.

For more information, visit https://avicena.tech