News: Optoelectronics
20 March 2026
OpenLight receives first volume production orders Tower’s PH18DA InP-on-silicon photonic platform
Photonic application-specific integrated circuit (PASIC) chip designer and manufacturer OpenLight of Goleta, near Santa Barbara, CA, USA (which launched as an independent company in June 2022, introducing the first open silicon photonics platform with heterogeneously integrated III-V lasers, modulators, amplifiers and detectors) has announced the first volume production orders by a customer on its PH18DA indium phosphide (InP) on silicon photonic platform, developed in collaboration with specialty analog foundry Tower Semiconductor Ltd of Migdal Haemek, Israel. Based on NewPhotonics 800G and 1.6T laser-integrated photonic integrated circuit (PIC) solution, this marks a step towards bringing highly integrated, laser-enabled photonic ICs into high-volume production for AI and hyperscale data-center networks.
For OpenLight, this production order represents a transition from advanced development to manufacturing-ready deployment, validating the PH18DA process as a scalable, production-proven platform for next-generation optical connectivity. NewPhotonics is the first OpenLight customer to bring its designs to volume production on PH18DA, enabling improved bandwidth density, power efficiency, and footprint reduction compared with conventional discrete silicon photonics optical implementations.
The production designs were developed using the OpenLight process design kit (PDK), integrating active photonic components into a single monolithic PIC. This level of integration shrinks the overall footprint, eliminates multiple sources of optical loss, reduces packaging and assembly costs, and delivers improved signal quality and energy efficiency critical for large-scale AI infrastructure designed for scale-up and scale-out data-center deployments.
“Reaching our first customer orders in volume production with PH18DA is a defining milestone for OpenLight and a clear validation of our heterogeneous III-V on silicon platform,” says OpenLight’s CEO Dr Adam Carter. “This achievement demonstrates that our technology is ready for production and capable of supporting real customer products at 800G and 1.6T for AI data-center networks,” he adds.
“The OpenLight platform enables us to deploy highly integrated photonic ICs built for volume, performance and scale demands in a single solution,” comments Doron Tal, NewPhotonics’ senior VP & general manager of Optical Connectivity. “With 200G-per-lane designs and heterogeneously integrated lasers on a monolithic PIC, our customers can leverage our unique OSPic optical signal processing in a unified architecture that delivers the power efficiency, bandwidth density and manufacturing consistency required for DSP-based and LPO OSFP pluggable and near-packaged optics (NPO) solutions,” he adds.
“The PH18DA process was developed to enable scalable, high-yield manufacturing of heterogeneous photonic ICs enabling Tower to expand its served market in optical modules by adding an integrated laser to our offering,” says Dr Ed Preisler, VP & general manager of Tower’s RF business unit. “The first orders for volume production demonstrate the maturity of the process and its readiness to support advanced optical platforms at production scale.”
OpenLight raises $34m in Series A funding round to scale integrated photonics for AI data centers
OpenLight completes Telcordia GR-468 qualification for silicon photonics components
OpenLight demos 224G InP-based modulator for Tower’s PH18DA platform
