Silicon photonics optical circuit switching engine planned for AI data centers

Voyant Photonics is developing a chip-scale optical circuit switching (OCS) engine aimed at AI data center networks, based on the company’s silicon photonics switching architecture previously industrialized for its FMCW LiDAR platform. The OCS Engine is intended to be integrated into next-generation data center switching platforms as a building block, rather than shipped as a complete networking system.

The plan is to offer the OCS technology as an “engine” that optical networking companies can incorporate into their own platforms. Voyant says it is adapting the photonic switching platform to data center requirements including non-blocking switching topologies, optical loss and crosstalk, fiber attach and port density, packaging, testability, wavelength and modulation compatibility, and integration with network control systems.

For data center operators trying to scale GPU clusters, OCS is attractive because it can reduce dependence on repeated optical-electrical-optical conversions and allow network topologies to be dynamically reconfigured to better match changing workloads. But the bar is high: any OCS building block has to hit loss, reliability, and operational integration targets that don’t create more problems than it solves.

Voyant’s switch matrix originates in its FMCW LiDAR systems, where it routes light using discrete, solid-state optical paths rather than moving mirrors or continuous analog beam steering. In a data center OCS implementation, Voyant says the same architecture can be configured to route optical signals among communication ports.

The company says it has spent nearly a decade developing optical switches designed to re-route light in microseconds, and that the technology has moved from lab development into semiconductor production for its LiDAR platform. Voyant also describes a silicon photonics library engineered for wafer-level yield, robustness to process variation, and dense integration.

Voyant lists target characteristics for the OCS Engine including solid-state switching (no moving elements) building on technology engineered for “trillions of cycles,” switching time under 5 microseconds, “low optical loss” intended to support cascading multiple components into larger fabrics, and chip-scale integration using high-density silicon photonics. The company also points to semiconductor manufacturability and an integration model where optical networking companies incorporate the switching engine into their own systems, including hyperscaler-specific architectures. Voyant says the architecture provides a potential path toward tighter integration with co-packaged optics (CPO).

“AI infrastructure is reaching a point where moving data efficiently between compute resources is becoming as important as the compute itself,” said Clement Nouvel, CEO of Voyant Photonics. “Our approach is to give optical networking companies a compact switching engine they can build into their own platforms.”

“Reliability isn’t something we are adding to this technology for the data center—it has been a design requirement from the beginning,” said Dr. Steven Miller, co-founder and CTO of Voyant Photonics, citing LiDAR-driven requirements like continuous operation, temperature variation, manufacturing variability, and large numbers of switching cycles.

Commercially, Voyant says it plans to work with optical networking suppliers to develop and integrate the OCS Engine into next-generation switching platforms. More details are at voyantphotonics.com.