PIC Summit USA 2027
Presenter: Nick Harris, Ph.D., Founder and CEO
Title: Reinventing Optical Interconnect for the Decade Ahead in AI
Abstract: Co-packaged optics is moving from validation to design-in, and today’s choices will set AI infrastructure’s power, cost, and reliability through the coming decade. Nick Harris, Ph.D., Lightmatter founder and CEO, contends the optical engine and laser must be reinvented, not refined. The bridge to CPO runs through near-packaged optics (NPO) in open form factors like CPX and XPO, which will carry most early volume but are not drop-in commodities.
Optically connected scale-up domains will multiply laser, fiber, and connector counts exponentially. Managing that complexity and supply constraints demand dense, liquid-cooled laser packaging, field-serviceable fiber interfaces, and bidirectional (BiDi) links that halve fiber counts. Lightmatter’s Passage BiDi DWDM photonic engines and Guide foundry-grade VLSP lasers, demonstrated in silicon today, form the roadmap from NPO to 3D-integrated CPO. He will close by unveiling how Lightmatter brings production-grade CPO to NVLink and NVSwitch scale-up topologies and OCP open architectures for the highest-volume AI clusters.
Date: February 1, 2027
Time: 4:10 pm
About PIC Summit:
AI is changing where integrated photonics must operate and what it must deliver. As compute systems become larger and denser, the movement of data is becoming a defining constraint on performance, power, and system design. Meeting that challenge requires more than a faster component: it requires progress across architecture, photonic platforms, light sources, manufacturing, packaging, testing, system integration, and commercialization.
PIC Summit USA 2027 brings that complete conversation to Sunnyvale. The summit connects North America’s growing integrated photonics community with leading customers, experts, investors, and technologies from around the world. The event will explore what it takes to bring integrated photonics to scale throughout the AI data center.