News: Portfolio 2008

A Super-Cool Chip

Lightwire introduces the new information transmission technology at conference.

A Lehigh Valley company has unveiled a breakthrough computer chip that uses existing materials in a novel way to speed up the flow of data between computers.

Lightwire of Upper Macungie Township announced Monday it has produced a silicon-based optical transceiver that converts light to electricity and back at 10 billion bits of data per second. The combination technology is attractive because silicon chips process information well, while traditional optical chips are ideal for carrying data at high speeds and over long distances.

The company, and its competitors, have been working for the better part of the decade to find a faster, cheaper and more compact way to send data between computers. Indeed, IBM and Luxtera have proposed competing solutions, while Intel, the world's largest chip company, is hard at work on the technology, which is critical as the demand for bandwidth grows.

But the team at Lightwire, led by local entrepreneur Kal Shastri, says its product requires the least power, provides the best signal integrity and is the cheapest.

"The fundamental problem is how to move large amounts of data at high speeds. This is everyone's problem," said Shastri in an interview last week at the company's offices. "If you can use the same chip that manipulates the electrons to manipulate the photons, you have changed the game."

The company has already received venture capital backing from several firms. Artiman Ventures, its largest investor, has contributed more than $10 million, according to Amit Shah, a partner at the fund.

If successful, Lightwire will effectively tap into the billions of dollars in research and existing infrastructure that has built the mass-market silicon chip industry, which produces the semiconductors that power everything from computers to cell phones.

That will give the optical industry, and the wider world of computing, a quantum leap forward.

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