A programmable 2D photonic chip controls light on a semiconductor, enabling optical switching, computing, and sensing for AI systems without moving parts.
Lumotive has announced a landmark breakthrough with the successful demonstration of the world’s first programmable two-dimensional (2D) photonic beamforming chip based on its Light Control Metasurface (LCM) architecture.
This advance in semiconductor-based photonics enables electronic control of light across two dimensions within a single chip—a capability long pursued in optical science and considered essential for scalable programmable optical systems.
By enabling software-defined control of light, Lumotive’s innovation creates new possibilities for optical circuit switching in AI data centers, photonic communications, optical computing, and advanced 3D sensing for applications such as autonomous and humanoid robotics.
Data center networks are facing increasingly greater challenges in managing bandwidth and power consumption in network clusters, especially among hyperscalers. These constraints have renewed industry focus on optical circuit switching, which enables direct optical connections between endpoints and significantly improves network efficiency. Lumotive’s programmable photonic technology provides a scalable path toward the high-port-count switching architectures required for next-generation AI infrastructure.
The chip forms and steers beams of light across two axes with high precision, without any moving parts. Using nanoscale optical elements built into a semiconductor platform, Lumotive’s LCM technology enables real-time beamforming with the reliability and scalability of modern semiconductor manufacturing.
This capability marks a shift in how optical devices are built. The metasurface can control the phase of light across two dimensions, allowing a single chip to perform functions that usually need multiple components such as mirrors, lenses, or beam splitters. This opens the possibility of general-purpose flat optics, where one semiconductor device can dynamically control how light is handled within a system.
“Two-dimensional beamforming has been one of the most challenging problems in photonics for decades,” said Dr. Gleb Akselrod, Founder and CTO of Lumotive. “What we’ve demonstrated is a new paradigm where the behavior of light can be programmed directly at the semiconductor level.”
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