eetimes.com, Apr. 04, 2025 –
The 2025 Optical Fiber Communications Conference, or OFC 2025, took place this week in San Francisco, Calif., amid the excitement of optical networking being one part of the solution to solving the many facets of AI compute bottlenecks.
One this is clear: silicon photonics and co-packaged optics have reached an inflection point, especially more so following Jensen Huang’s enthusiasm for silicon photonics during his keynote at Nvidia’s GTC 2025 a few weeks earlier about 50 miles down south from the OFC 2025 venue at Moscone.
As if to provide further evidence of the rise of market and investor interest in silicon photonics and optical networking, you could probably add up at least a billion dollars worth of venture capital funding being poured into this sector. For example, just a few weeks ago, I caught up with Preet Virk in Santa Clara, Calif. As co-founder and COO of Celestial AI, he displayed a confident enthusiasm for how his company will be able to address the interconnect challenge in cloud service providers’ infrastructure with its photonic fabric. The company has just raised another $250 million as part of a series C1 round, taking its total to $515 million.
Other companies making news at OFC 2025 were Retym coming out of stealth with its $75 million series D funding (taking total funding to over $180 million). Lightmatter (which raised $400 million in its series D last October) also unveiled two new optical interconnect technologies that mean large multi-die chiplet designs are no longer limited by the amount of beachfront each chiplet has for I/O, enabling up to 256 Tbps of I/O from a single package.