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19 Nov 2025
Lab-to-fab initiative launched at Semicon Europa as Avicena introduces new ultra-low-power 'LightBundle' links.
Typically touted for their suitability in next-generation displays and mixed reality hardware, microLEDs now look set to make an impact in a completely different application area - AI infrastructure.
During this week’s Semicon Europa event in Munich, Germany, the giant French research lab CEA Leti launched a three-year initiative to develop microLEDs for ultrafast data transfer, while US startup Avicena has launched a new ultra-low-power microLED interconnect at the SuperCompute 2025 show in St Louis.
On top of that, a team at Microsoft has developed prototype microLED links that are said to break the typical trade-off between speed, cost, energy consumption, and reliability.
Lab-to-fab
CEA Leti says that its “lab-to-fab” effort, slated to kick off in January, draws on the research institute's deep expertise in microLED process technology.
Open to all parties in the microelectronics supply chain - and looking to engage makers of microLEDs, optical fibers, photodiodes, and interconnects, as well as chipmakers, system integrators, and hyperscalers - the project is said to be aiming for “orders-of-magnitude” data transfer gains.
Lab CEO Sébastien Dauvé explained the thinking thus: “Over the past decade, the computing power required to train leading-edge AI models has exploded by factors of millions, doubling roughly every three to four months as systems become more complex and data-hungry.
“Supercomputers demand ever-faster communication links with very high energy efficiency and ultra-low latency - but interconnect performance is lagging behind compute power. That gap calls for a paradigm shift capable of boosting high-performance computing speed by orders of magnitude.”
At the moment AI infrastructure relies on a combination of legacy copper interconnects and laser-based solutions, with the latter able to provide speedy connectivity but at the expense of cost and power consumption - partly because of the threshold current that must be exceeded before a laser emits light.
Microsoft’s MOSAIC prototype
On the other hand microLEDs can emit light even at extremely low currents - with CEA Leti suggesting that they offer a compelling alternative, consuming less energy than either copper- or laser-based systems.
That advantage has also been noted by Microsoft, whose recent “MOSAIC” project results suggest that microLEDs can break the fundamental trade-off between reach, power, and reliability.
According to a Microsoft research paper presented at September's SIGCOMM event in Portugal, the prototype MOSAIC technology - which also uses printed micro-optics - is able to deliver ten times the reach of copper, while reducing power consumption by up to two-thirds, and much-improved reliability compared with today's laser-based optical links.
“MicroLED represents a true paradigm shift for short-range optical, point-to-point data interconnects," Dauvé added. “It delivers extremely high data-density transfer rates with far better energy efficiency than current technologies.
“Unlike silicon photonics or VCSEL [links], microLED is scalable for massive parallel communication. By combining the complementary expertise of our program members, we aim to break through the interconnect power and density bottlenecks that limit next-generation computing.”
Femtojoule energy consumption
Avicena is looking to make a more immediate impact with its new “LightBundle” microLED links, which are said to offer 4 Gb/s lane speed alongside transmitter currents as low as 100 µA per LED.
“While silicon photonics can achieve low effective power by splitting a single external laser across many resonant modulators, microLEDs inherently generate their own light, dramatically simplifying packaging,” points out the US firm.
“Avicena microLED transmitters are only a few microns in size, require no temperature stabilization, and avoid complex control loops. These microscopic emitters can be arrayed at extremely high density to deliver terabits of aggregate bandwidth.”
The LightBundle chiplet transceivers are described as well-suited to various packaging architectures - including co-packaged optics (CPO), on-board optics (OBO), pluggable optical modules, and wide memory interconnects.
Avicena’s chief scientist Rob Kalman said: “We already demonstrated an efficient microLED link in a live demo at ECOC 2025 in September.
“By further optimizing our highly sensitive receivers, we have managed to further reduce the operating currents of the microLEDs and obtained [transmitter] energy consumption down further to tens of femtojoules for this part of the link.
“Combined with the unique properties of microLEDs, we can achieve unmatched energy efficiency in our LightBundle interconnects. This benchmark shows the scalability of our roadmap, how microLED technology can replace legacy laser-based links with a simpler, more reliable and far lower power solution.”
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