Swinburne spinout Microcomb launches photonic chip to cut data centre power use
Microcomb, a company formed by researchers from Swinburne, Monash and RMIT, has launched optical microcomb technology aimed at moving more data through AI data centres with less energy. It has pre-seed funding from Innovation Victoria and is building a demonstrator.
A new deep technology company, Microcomb, has launched out of Swinburne University of Technology with photonic chip technology aimed at the energy demands of data centres. The company says it is the first in Australia to bring optical microcomb technology to market and one of the first worldwide to apply it to data centres.
The technology builds on research published in Nature and uses an optical microcomb, a fingernail-sized chip that converts a single laser colour into many colours of laser light for carrying data. The chip splits that light into many channels, which the company likens to turning a single-lane road into a multi-lane data highway.
Professor David Moss, director of the Swinburne Optical Sciences Centre and a Microcomb co-founder, said conventional optical transmission relies on multiple lasers to create separate channels. He said that approach "requires significant power to operate the lasers and detectors, while limiting the amount of data each channel can carry". In Microcomb's design, a laser sends light down a fibre and a small microcomb chip is inserted to split it into multiple channels.
Moss said a key advantage is the small footprint, which could let the technology be introduced without large components or major upgrades. He said AI data centres depend on many servers working as one large computer, which demands far more connections, fibre optics and data movement, all of which consume power. Moss described the energy needed to support this growth as "the huge bottleneck we’re up against".
Microcomb brings together David Moss from Swinburne, Bill Corcoran from Monash University and Arnan Mitchell from RMIT University. It has support from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Optical Microcombs and pre-seed investment from Innovation Victoria. With incorporation complete and financing secured, the company has started building a customer-informed demonstrator and is talking to prospective customers and partners in AI infrastructure and photonic communications.