Critical Need
Data centers represent two percent of the overall electricity consumption in the United States, while globally generating approximately 1.16 billion tons of CO₂ emissions annually. The rapid expansion of the internet and the rise of artificial intelligence have accelerated the need for advanced generations of data center infrastructure. Notably, the interconnect network has emerged as a critical bottleneck affecting performance and efficiency. Optical switches have gained attention as a promising solution to this challenge. These switches facilitate dynamic network reconfiguration, leading to potential efficiency enhancements exceeding 50 percent in data centers. However, current optical interconnect technologies cannot scale to meet the demand for higher data rates while tolerating the additional losses from optical switches.

Technology Vision
Lucidean is developing energy-efficient, low-cost, and loss-tolerant interconnects for optical switch networks that will scale to meet the performance demands of next-generation data center networks. Lucidean’s interconnect technology is designed for high-data-rate transmission and does not rely on the power-hungry and expensive techniques used to achieve such high performance in the industry today. These improved signal processing techniques enable a scalable solution for the high-volume data center market.

Potential for Impact
Lucidean’s interconnects will enable scaling next-generation data center networks to efficiently meet the growing demand for internet and artificial intelligence computing workloads. Such optical switch-based networks have been shown to improve both the energy-efficiency of the interconnect network and the use of computer servers. This could improve a data center’s overall energy consumption by up to 50 percent—a potential savings of one percent of U.S. electricity use.