Nvidia-backed startup Scintil Photonics starts testing laser chips with customers

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO, March 11 (Reuters) - Scintil Photonics, a French startup backed by Nvidia, on Wednesday said it has started providing laser ‌chips to customers for testing.

Scintil is one of a number of ‌startups working out how to move information around inside artificial intelligence servers such as those made ​by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices using pulses of light rather than electrical signals, a move that could ease the task of linking many chips together to form one large computer. Analysts expect Nvidia to reveal more about its plans for ‌the technology, called co-packaged optics, ⁠at its developer conference in Silicon Valley next week.

All optical systems rely on a laser chip to generate the beams of ⁠light that will carry information, and those chips, made with a special material called indium phosphide and mostly used in long-distance communications networks, are not currently made in ​large ​enough volumes to meet the demand from ​AI data centers. That supply dynamic ‌drove Nvidia earlier this month to invest $2 billion each in two of the largest makers of those lasers, Lumentum and Coherent.

Scintil, which secured funding from Nvidia in a $58 million funding round last year, has come up with a way to package indium phosphide lasers with some of the other elements needed for optical ‌communications into a single chip, working with ​Israel-based Tower Semiconductor as a manufacturing partner.

Matt Crowley, ​Scintil's CEO, said the company ​is in discussions with "six companies, seven companies" that want to ‌use its technology by 2028 but declined ​to name them, ​citing nondisclosure agreements. He said Scintil's goal is to be able to produce hundreds of thousands of chips per month by then.

"The way we ​make it is fundamentally different," ‌Crowley said in an interview. "We can mass produce them ... and we ​can satisfy a big chunk of the market."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis ​in San Francisco; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )