MicroLED optical interconnection is gaining unprecedented popularity, and two overseas companies reveal the latest progress

With the recent rise in the popularity of Micro LED CPO optical interconnection, many overseas companies have also announced the latest business and technical cooperation progress.

Mojo Vision and U.S. semiconductor company develop high-density Micro LED interconnection solutions

Recently, U.S. Micro LED microdisplay company Mojo Vision and U.S. data infrastructure semiconductor company Marvell Technology announced a long-term strategic cooperation to jointly develop a new generation of optical interconnect solutions to provide power for the next wave of development of high-performance artificial intelligence data center infrastructure.

The two parties signed a joint development agreement covering multiple generations of products. It is reported that the two parties have been secretly conducting research and development cooperation for more than a year. Through the combination of Mojo Vision's unique Micro LED platform and Marvell's advanced connection technology, the new solution will support a variety of AI data center interconnection forms, mainly for hyperscale and cloud data center customers.

Senior Vice President and General Manager of Marvell’s Connectivity Business Unit said that Micro LED technology is an important technical capability for achieving high-performance data center connections. Nikhil Balram, CEO of Mojo Vision, pointed out that its massively parallel optical I/O design can implement thousands of optical channels on a chip the size of a grain of sand, significantly reducing energy consumption per unit bit while achieving an order of magnitude leap in bandwidth. Through innovative software-defined technology, the system can dynamically map Micro LED emitters with pixel-level redundancy, ensuring extremely high reliability.

According to data, Mojo Vision initially focused on the development of Micro LED contact lenses, and will shift to the research and development of Micro LED microdisplays in 2023.

Mojo Vision’s Micro LED technology platform includes monolithic RGB Micro LED displays for AI smart glasses, as well as Micro LED optical interconnect technology. Among them, Mojo Vision’s Micro LED optical interconnection technology solution has the characteristics of ultra-low power consumption of Sub-1 pJ/bit and bandwidth density of over 100 Tbps/mm2, which can meet the power consumption, bandwidth and integration requirements of large-scale AI systems for interconnection technology.

Avicena launches Micro LED optical interconnect evaluation kit to accelerate the implementation of next-generation AI computing architecture

Avicena, a developer of Micro LED optical interconnect technology, recently officially launched the Micro LED optical interconnect evaluation platform - LightBundle eKit. The platform uses an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)-based transceiver that integrates an LED array, a photodetector (PD), and a microlens array in a single architecture, and implements data transmission through a high-performance multi-core optical fiber bundle.

This evaluation kit called LightBundle eKit is mainly aimed at hyperscale data centers, AI accelerators, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and network equipment architects, aiming to assist them in conducting in-depth technical evaluation of next-generation optical links.

Avicena said that as the performance requirements of AI systems continue to increase, traditional copper interconnection has reached bottlenecks in terms of bandwidth capacity, transmission distance, wiring complexity and power consumption control, and Micro LED optical interconnection solutions are the key path to break through these limitations.

In terms of technical parameters and performance, the evaluation kit shows extremely high specifications. The system contains a total of 320 Micro LED data channels, with a single channel rate up to 3.5 Gbps.

In order to ensure high reliability in commercial environments, the kit adopts a redundant design and is configured with 256 active channels and 64 backup channels, making the total data link throughput up to 896 Gbps. It is worth noting that at a transmission rate of 512 Gbps, the system can achieve a raw bit error rate (BER) better than $10^{-9}$ without any forward error correction (FEC) link. Currently, the platform supports fiber optic connection distances of 5 meters and 10 meters.

In order to provide a complete engineering test environment, LightBundle eKit integrates a host interface board, reference driver and diagnostic system on the hardware side; on the software side, it is equipped with a customized test platform with a graphical user interface (GUI). This complete tool chain allows engineers to comprehensively characterize optical signal integrity, link budget, power efficiency, and crosstalk performance, and monitor eye diagrams or generate bit error rate bathtub curves in real time.

According to Avicena's progress plan, the evaluation kit will be provided to specific early partners on a priority basis by the end of March 2026, and larger-scale market supply is expected to begin in the second quarter of 2026. The release of this product marks that high-density optical interconnection technology based on Micro LED is steadily moving from the laboratory research and development stage to actual system-level verification, providing solid technical support for the construction of ultra-large-scale AI clusters in the future.