Lightmatter, the leader in photonic (super)computing, today announced a groundbreaking achievement in optical communications: a 16-wavelength bidirectional Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) optical link operating on one strand of standard single-mode (SM) fiber. Powered by Lightmatter's industry-leading Passage interconnect and Guide laser technologies, this breakthrough shatters previous limitations in fiber bandwidth density and spectral utilization, setting a new benchmark for high-performance, resilient data center interconnects.

With the rise of complex trillion-parameter Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, scaling AI workloads is increasingly bottlenecked by bandwidth and radix (I/O port count) limitations in data center infrastructure. Lightmatter's Passage technology delivers an unprecedented 800 Gbps bidirectional bandwidth (400 Gbps transmit and 400 Gbps receive) per single-mode fiber for distances of several hundred meters or more. This achievement advances chip I/O design by simultaneously increasing both radix and bandwidth per fiber compared to existing co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions.