Chip-Scale Frequency Combs Power the Data Future

Researchers from Columbia Engineering have created a new chip that can transform a laser into a “frequency comb,” generating multiple powerful light channels at the same time.

By utilizing a special locking mechanism, the researchers cleaned messy laser light and achieved lab-grade accuracy on a small silicon device. This accomplishment can significantly improve data center efficiency and drive innovations in LiDAR, sensing, and quantum tech.

Microcombs Shrink Lab-Grade Precision Onto a Chip 

The researchers created the high-power microcomb device to improve LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology.

LiDAR is a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed laser light to calculate distances and create high-resolution 3D models of the environment. It operates like radar, but uses light instead of sound.

The system emits laser pulses and times their return to measure precise distances to objects and track movement in real time.

Consisting of a laser, a scanner, and a specialized GPS receiver, a LiDAR instrument generates a detailed ‘point cloud’ of data, which is then used to create 3D maps for applications like autonomous driving, environmental monitoring, surveying, and archaeology.

The technology was invented way back in the 1960s, initially applied in meteorology, ocean sensing, and topographic mapping, before its usage was extended to space by NASA. In the 2010s, commercial automobiles began utilizing LiDAR, and since then, automotive LiDAR has become very popular in high-end electric cars.

Given the growing application of LiDAR, researchers have been constantly working on improving the tech. Many exciting innovations of laser technologies are integrated with advanced optics, enabling further miniaturization and holding promise for the long-term future of LiDAR systems.

The focus of researchers from Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science was to find a way to unlock higher power and spectral purity from compact laser systems to enable chip-scale frequency comb generation to enhance communications, sensing, spectroscopy, LiDAR, and other integrated photonic applications.

So, they have created a microcomb, a miniature photonic device that produces a series of evenly spaced optical frequencies, like the teeth of a comb, on a chip.

These integrated miniature frequency combs have the potential to reduce the size of complex systems traditionally required for such applications. Thus, integrated microcombs are promising for numerous applications that require high output power, small footprint, and high efficiency, such as spectroscopy, sensing, and data communications.

Recently, researchers have demonstrated electrically pumped microcombs through the integration of gain chips (semiconductor optical elements) with top-notch resonators. But their overall optical power is still much lower than what practical solutions need.

This limitation has been addressed by Columbia researchers who demonstrated high-power electrically pumped Kerr-frequency microcombs. 

From ‘Messy’ Diodes to Clean Microcombs

Interestingly, this was an accidental discovery. A few years ago, researchers in the lab of co-author Michal Lipson, an Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of applied physics, were working on a project to enhance LiDAR capabilities when they noticed something incredible.

They were designing high-power chips that could generate brighter beams of light, and “as we sent more and more power through the chip, we noticed that it was creating what we call a frequency comb,” said Andres Gil-Molina, a former postdoc researcher in Lipson’s lab and currently a principal engineer at Xscape Photonics.

A frequency comb is a spectrum made of discrete and regularly spaced spectral lines. What this means is that this special type of light contains different colors lined up next to each other in an orderly fashion, as you see in a rainbow.

Here, dozens of light frequencies shine. But the gaps between these different colors or frequencies stay dark. So, when looking at these different bright frequencies on a spectrogram, they look like spikes or teeth on a comb, hence the name.

Given that different colors of light do not interfere with each other, each tooth acts as its own channel, offering an incredible opportunity to send several streams of data simultaneously.

While extremely beneficial, creating a powerful frequency comb requires big and expensive lasers and amplifiers. 

Published in Nature Photonics¹, the paper details how the same thing can be done on a single chip. 

“The technology we’ve developed takes a very powerful laser and turns it into dozens of clean, high-power channels on a chip. That means you can replace racks of individual lasers with one compact device, cutting cost, saving space, and opening the door to much faster, more energy-efficient systems.”

– Gil-Molina

Not only can this research fulfill the tremendous demand created by data centers for powerful and efficient sources of light containing many wavelengths, but it also marks a milestone in the team’s mission to advance silicon photonics.

Known for enabling significantly faster data transfer while consuming less power and generating less heat than traditional electronic circuits, silicon photonics has found applications in high-speed data centers, AI, LiDAR, quantum technologies, IoT, and 5G.

Silicon photonics integrates light-based components onto a silicon chip using the standard CMOS manufacturing processes to create photonic integrated circuits (PICs). It utilizes silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers as the semiconductor platform to form waveguides and other components that guide light for faster, more energy-efficient communication and smaller, more cost-effective devices.

“As this technology becomes increasingly central to critical infrastructure and our daily lives, this type of progress is essential to ensuring that data centers are as efficient as possible.”

– Lipson

How Self-Injection Locking Cleans and Multiplies Light

What is the most powerful laser that can be put on a chip? This question led the researchers to their breakthrough.

The Columbia team chose a multimode laser diode. A laser diode (LD) is a semiconductor device that produces single-color light at a specific wavelength. Multimode laser diodes, or Broad Area Lasers (BALs), provide higher power outputs and are ideal when high optical power is required and beam quality is less critical.

These devices produce a broader beam, which reduces beam quality but increases power density. Multimode laser diodes are widely used in applications such as medical devices, printing and imaging, and laser cutting tools. 

While producing enormous amounts of light, the beam of these lasers is “messy,” making it hard to utilize them for precise applications. 

Integrating a multimode laser diode into a silicon photonics chip, where the light pathways are only as wide as just a few micrometres (μm) or even hundreds of nanometers (nm), however, calls for careful engineering.

To purify this powerful but very noisy source of light, the team used a locking mechanism.

The self-injection locking was employed in the nonlinear regime to generate high on-chip power combs and purify the coherence of the pump source at the same time.

Injection locking is the frequency effect that can occur when an oscillator is disturbed by a second oscillator operating at a nearby frequency. When the frequencies are close enough and coupling is strong, the second oscillator can capture the first one, causing it to have essentially the same frequency as the second oscillator.

This technique is primarily applied to continuous-wave (CW) single-frequency laser sources when a high-power output is required, combining with a very low intensity noise and phase noise.

It relies on silicon photonics to reshape and clean up the output of the laser, generating a more stable and cleaner beam, which is called high coherence. Once the light is purified,  nonlinear optical properties of the chip take over, splitting the single powerful beam into dozens of colors that are evenly spaced, which is the key characteristic of a frequency comb.

The resulting compact, high-efficiency light source combines an industrial laser’s raw power with the stability and precision required for advanced communications and sensing.

The low-coherence source was integrated with high output power and silicon nitride ring resonators. The resonators are designed with normal group velocity dispersion, which means velocity decreases as optical frequency increases. This occurs when longer light wavelengths travel faster than shorter wavelengths in a medium, causing optical pulses to spread out over time.

The microcombs created by the team achieved total on-chip power levels up to 158 mW. The comb lines, meanwhile, had an intrinsic linewidth of 200 kHz. The researchers also showed more than twice the number of comb lines surpassing 100 μW and an order-of-magnitude higher on-chip power levels than any previously reported results.

Researchers said:

“Our novel electrically pumped microcomb source has the size, power, and linewidth required for data communications, and could strongly impact other areas such as high-performance computing and ubiquitous devices for spectral-sensing and time-keeping applications.” 

The breakthrough comes at a time when the AI boom is causing an explosive increase in the demand for data center capacity. This is causing a strain on their infrastructure, struggling to move information at speed. As a result, companies are building AI-specialized infrastructure to handle the massive computational requirements for training and running large AI models. 

Already, fiber optic links are being utilized by advanced data centers to transport data, but even they depend on single-wavelength lasers.

By having dozens of beams running in parallel through the same single fiber, instead of one beam carrying just one data stream, frequency combs can dramatically enhance data centers’ capabilities.

This very same principle was behind WDM, or wavelength-division multiplexing, a fiber-optic technology that sends multiple data streams simultaneously over a single optical fiber by assigning each stream a unique wavelength of light, significantly increasing data capacity and allowing for higher bandwidth. WDM helped the internet become a global high-speed network in the late 1990s.

Now, Lipson’s team is making high-power, multi-wavelength combs so small that they can fit directly on a chip. This achievement will make it possible to introduce this capability into those parts of modern computing systems that are compact and expensive.

This way, the chips can change how data centers operate by streamlining the way information is transmitted and processed, influencing the design of next-gen data centers and many other devices that depend on efficient optical communication. These very same chips could also enable advanced LiDAR systems, compact quantum devices, extremely precise optical clocks, and portable spectrometers.

“This is about bringing lab-grade light sources into real-world devices. If you can make them powerful, efficient, and small enough, you can put them almost anywhere.”

– Gil-Molina

Swipe to scroll →

Investing in Laser Tech

A global leader in photonics and laser technologies, Coherent Corp. (COHR -9.19%) produces semiconductor laser diodes and high-performance optical components.

With its core business revolving around developing and manufacturing photonics-based solutions, which are critical in today’s age of advanced computing and data transmission, Coherent has established itself as a dominant force in the optical communications industry and commands a strong market share. 

Its segments include Networking, which leverages its compound semiconductor technology to deliver components and subsystems, Materials include optoelectronic devices like those based on silicon carbide (SiC), gallium antimonide (GaSb), gallium arsenide (GaAs), indium phosphide (InP), zinc selenide (ZnSe), and zinc sulfide (ZnS), and the Lasers segment serves industrial customers in semiconductor, precision manufacturing, and aerospace & defense, and others through its lasers and optics products.

Coherent Corp. (COHR -9.19%)

With its broad range of innovative photonics-based products, Coherent is able to offer customized and end-to-end solutions to its customers as well as serve AI infrastructure’s scalability needs.

Its strategic focus on the AI market positions Coherent as a potential major beneficiary of the ongoing AI growth. This is an addition to the increasing demand for high-performance optical components. But at the same time, the company faces challenges from increased competition in both the AI and optical communications sectors.

When it comes to Coherent’s market performance, it is enjoying a bullish moment, much like the broad stock market. Up 29.16% this year so far, COHR shares are currently trading at $123.70, at the time of writing – a new all-time high (ATH) that puts the company’s market capitalization at $19.20 billion.

Back in April, COHR shares had fallen to $50 as the stock market experienced a correction, and since then, Coherent’s shares have rallied about 146%. And just two years ago, COHR was trading under $30, representing a strong recovery.

With that, the company is delivering an EPS (TTM) of -0.62 and a P/E (TTM) of -198.72.

As for Coherent’s financial position, it reported a record revenue of $1.53 billion for the fourth quarter ended June 30, 2025. GAAP gross margin during the period was 35.7% and GAAP net loss was $0.83 per diluted share, while on a non-GAAP basis, its gross margin was 38.1% and net income per diluted share was $1.00.

For the full fiscal 2025, its revenue was also a record $5.81 billion. GAAP gross margin was 35.2% and GAAP net loss was $0.52 per diluted share, while non-GAAP gross margin was 37.9% and net income per diluted share of $3.53.

According to CEO Jim Anderson:

“We delivered a strong fiscal 2025 with revenue growth of 23% and non-GAAP EPS expansion of 191%. We believe we are well positioned to continue to drive strong revenue and profit growth over the long-term given our exposure to key growth drivers such as AI datacenters.”

During this quarter, the company began shipments of its 1.6T transceiver products, enabling high-performance AI datacenter applications. A new diamond SiC composite material was also introduced for advanced cooling of these datacenters.

Moreover, Coherent saw its first revenue from Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) and introduced the excimer laser platform that’s been updated for high-temperature production of superconductor tape for emerging energy tech, like fusion. 

In the past couple of weeks, Coherent has released several new products, including an entire series of quad-channel ICs that allows for more efficient and faster optical transceivers for AI and cloud, the industry’s first QSFP28 Dual Laser 100G ZR solution to maximize capacity on existing fiber infrastructure, and high-power 400 mW continuous-wave lasers to meet the demanding requirements of co-packaged optics and silicon photonics applications.

Recently, Coherent demonstrated its next-generation 2D VCSEL and photodiode (PD) arrays to address the surging data traffic demands in modern datacenters.

A couple of weeks ago, Coherent entered into amendments, which include refinancing existing revolving credit commitments and increasing the total facility to $700 million, to its Credit Agreement with JPMorgan Chase Bank (JPM -1.52%) and other lenders, improving the company’s liquidity and financial flexibility to support operations and growth.

Conclusion

Columbia University has made an engineering achievement, showing how unexpected moments in science can lead to even bigger and better discoveries with the capability to redefine entire fields. By transforming a single messy beam into dozens of powerful, stable light channels, the team has laid the groundwork for the next generation of optical systems.

From revolutionizing LiDAR and shrinking quantum devices to boosting the capacity of AI-driven data centers, this technology represents a major leap in photonics integration. And as the world marches toward faster, more energy-efficient communication systems, compact frequency comb chips could form the basis of future computing infrastructure.

Click here to learn all about investing in artificial intelligence.

---

References

1. Gil-Molina, A., Antman, Y., Westreich, O., et al. (2025). High-power electrically pumped microcombs. Nature Photonics, 19(10), 873–879. Published 7 October 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01769-z

Researchers from Columbia Engineering have created a new chip that can transform a laser into a “frequency comb,” generating multiple powerful light channels at the same time.

By utilizing a special locking mechanism, the researchers cleaned messy laser light and achieved lab-grade accuracy on a small silicon device. This accomplishment can significantly improve data center efficiency and drive innovations in LiDAR, sensing, and quantum tech.

Microcombs Shrink Lab-Grade Precision Onto a Chip 

The researchers created the high-power microcomb device to improve LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology.

LiDAR is a remote sensing technology that uses pulsed laser light to calculate distances and create high-resolution 3D models of the environment. It operates like radar, but uses light instead of sound.

The system emits laser pulses and times their return to measure precise distances to objects and track movement in real time.

Consisting of a laser, a scanner, and a specialized GPS receiver, a LiDAR instrument generates a detailed ‘point cloud’ of data, which is then used to create 3D maps for applications like autonomous driving, environmental monitoring, surveying, and archaeology.

The technology was invented way back in the 1960s, initially applied in meteorology, ocean sensing, and topographic mapping, before its usage was extended to space by NASA. In the 2010s, commercial automobiles began utilizing LiDAR, and since then, automotive LiDAR has become very popular in high-end electric cars.

Given the growing application of LiDAR, researchers have been constantly working on improving the tech. Many exciting innovations of laser technologies are integrated with advanced optics, enabling further miniaturization and holding promise for the long-term future of LiDAR systems.

The focus of researchers from Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science was to find a way to unlock higher power and spectral purity from compact laser systems to enable chip-scale frequency comb generation to enhance communications, sensing, spectroscopy, LiDAR, and other integrated photonic applications.

So, they have created a microcomb, a miniature photonic device that produces a series of evenly spaced optical frequencies, like the teeth of a comb, on a chip.

These integrated miniature frequency combs have the potential to reduce the size of complex systems traditionally required for such applications. Thus, integrated microcombs are promising for numerous applications that require high output power, small footprint, and high efficiency, such as spectroscopy, sensing, and data communications.

Recently, researchers have demonstrated electrically pumped microcombs through the integration of gain chips (semiconductor optical elements) with top-notch resonators. But their overall optical power is still much lower than what practical solutions need.

This limitation has been addressed by Columbia researchers who demonstrated high-power electrically pumped Kerr-frequency microcombs. 

From ‘Messy’ Diodes to Clean Microcombs

Interestingly, this was an accidental discovery. A few years ago, researchers in the lab of co-author Michal Lipson, an Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of applied physics, were working on a project to enhance LiDAR capabilities when they noticed something incredible.

They were designing high-power chips that could generate brighter beams of light, and “as we sent more and more power through the chip, we noticed that it was creating what we call a frequency comb,” said Andres Gil-Molina, a former postdoc researcher in Lipson’s lab and currently a principal engineer at Xscape Photonics.

A frequency comb is a spectrum made of discrete and regularly spaced spectral lines. What this means is that this special type of light contains different colors lined up next to each other in an orderly fashion, as you see in a rainbow.

Here, dozens of light frequencies shine. But the gaps between these different colors or frequencies stay dark. So, when looking at these different bright frequencies on a spectrogram, they look like spikes or teeth on a comb, hence the name.

Given that different colors of light do not interfere with each other, each tooth acts as its own channel, offering an incredible opportunity to send several streams of data simultaneously.

While extremely beneficial, creating a powerful frequency comb requires big and expensive lasers and amplifiers. 

Published in Nature Photonics¹, the paper details how the same thing can be done on a single chip. 

“The technology we’ve developed takes a very powerful laser and turns it into dozens of clean, high-power channels on a chip. That means you can replace racks of individual lasers with one compact device, cutting cost, saving space, and opening the door to much faster, more energy-efficient systems.”

– Gil-Molina

Not only can this research fulfill the tremendous demand created by data centers for powerful and efficient sources of light containing many wavelengths, but it also marks a milestone in the team’s mission to advance silicon photonics.

Known for enabling significantly faster data transfer while consuming less power and generating less heat than traditional electronic circuits, silicon photonics has found applications in high-speed data centers, AI, LiDAR, quantum technologies, IoT, and 5G.

Silicon photonics integrates light-based components onto a silicon chip using the standard CMOS manufacturing processes to create photonic integrated circuits (PICs). It utilizes silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers as the semiconductor platform to form waveguides and other components that guide light for faster, more energy-efficient communication and smaller, more cost-effective devices.

“As this technology becomes increasingly central to critical infrastructure and our daily lives, this type of progress is essential to ensuring that data centers are as efficient as possible.”

– Lipson

How Self-Injection Locking Cleans and Multiplies Light

What is the most powerful laser that can be put on a chip? This question led the researchers to their breakthrough.

The Columbia team chose a multimode laser diode. A laser diode (LD) is a semiconductor device that produces single-color light at a specific wavelength. Multimode laser diodes, or Broad Area Lasers (BALs), provide higher power outputs and are ideal when high optical power is required and beam quality is less critical.

These devices produce a broader beam, which reduces beam quality but increases power density. Multimode laser diodes are widely used in applications such as medical devices, printing and imaging, and laser cutting tools. 

While producing enormous amounts of light, the beam of these lasers is “messy,” making it hard to utilize them for precise applications. 

Integrating a multimode laser diode into a silicon photonics chip, where the light pathways are only as wide as just a few micrometres (μm) or even hundreds of nanometers (nm), however, calls for careful engineering.

To purify this powerful but very noisy source of light, the team used a locking mechanism.

The self-injection locking was employed in the nonlinear regime to generate high on-chip power combs and purify the coherence of the pump source at the same time.

Injection locking is the frequency effect that can occur when an oscillator is disturbed by a second oscillator operating at a nearby frequency. When the frequencies are close enough and coupling is strong, the second oscillator can capture the first one, causing it to have essentially the same frequency as the second oscillator.

This technique is primarily applied to continuous-wave (CW) single-frequency laser sources when a high-power output is required, combining with a very low intensity noise and phase noise.

It relies on silicon photonics to reshape and clean up the output of the laser, generating a more stable and cleaner beam, which is called high coherence. Once the light is purified,  nonlinear optical properties of the chip take over, splitting the single powerful beam into dozens of colors that are evenly spaced, which is the key characteristic of a frequency comb.

The resulting compact, high-efficiency light source combines an industrial laser’s raw power with the stability and precision required for advanced communications and sensing.

The low-coherence source was integrated with high output power and silicon nitride ring resonators. The resonators are designed with normal group velocity dispersion, which means velocity decreases as optical frequency increases. This occurs when longer light wavelengths travel faster than shorter wavelengths in a medium, causing optical pulses to spread out over time.

The microcombs created by the team achieved total on-chip power levels up to 158 mW. The comb lines, meanwhile, had an intrinsic linewidth of 200 kHz. The researchers also showed more than twice the number of comb lines surpassing 100 μW and an order-of-magnitude higher on-chip power levels than any previously reported results.

Researchers said:

“Our novel electrically pumped microcomb source has the size, power, and linewidth required for data communications, and could strongly impact other areas such as high-performance computing and ubiquitous devices for spectral-sensing and time-keeping applications.” 

The breakthrough comes at a time when the AI boom is causing an explosive increase in the demand for data center capacity. This is causing a strain on their infrastructure, struggling to move information at speed. As a result, companies are building AI-specialized infrastructure to handle the massive computational requirements for training and running large AI models. 

Already, fiber optic links are being utilized by advanced data centers to transport data, but even they depend on single-wavelength lasers.

By having dozens of beams running in parallel through the same single fiber, instead of one beam carrying just one data stream, frequency combs can dramatically enhance data centers’ capabilities.

This very same principle was behind WDM, or wavelength-division multiplexing, a fiber-optic technology that sends multiple data streams simultaneously over a single optical fiber by assigning each stream a unique wavelength of light, significantly increasing data capacity and allowing for higher bandwidth. WDM helped the internet become a global high-speed network in the late 1990s.

Now, Lipson’s team is making high-power, multi-wavelength combs so small that they can fit directly on a chip. This achievement will make it possible to introduce this capability into those parts of modern computing systems that are compact and expensive.

This way, the chips can change how data centers operate by streamlining the way information is transmitted and processed, influencing the design of next-gen data centers and many other devices that depend on efficient optical communication. These very same chips could also enable advanced LiDAR systems, compact quantum devices, extremely precise optical clocks, and portable spectrometers.

“This is about bringing lab-grade light sources into real-world devices. If you can make them powerful, efficient, and small enough, you can put them almost anywhere.”

– Gil-Molina

Swipe to scroll →

Investing in Laser Tech

A global leader in photonics and laser technologies, Coherent Corp. (COHR -9.19%) produces semiconductor laser diodes and high-performance optical components.

With its core business revolving around developing and manufacturing photonics-based solutions, which are critical in today’s age of advanced computing and data transmission, Coherent has established itself as a dominant force in the optical communications industry and commands a strong market share. 

Its segments include Networking, which leverages its compound semiconductor technology to deliver components and subsystems, Materials include optoelectronic devices like those based on silicon carbide (SiC), gallium antimonide (GaSb), gallium arsenide (GaAs), indium phosphide (InP), zinc selenide (ZnSe), and zinc sulfide (ZnS), and the Lasers segment serves industrial customers in semiconductor, precision manufacturing, and aerospace & defense, and others through its lasers and optics products.

Coherent Corp. (COHR -9.19%)

With its broad range of innovative photonics-based products, Coherent is able to offer customized and end-to-end solutions to its customers as well as serve AI infrastructure’s scalability needs.

Its strategic focus on the AI market positions Coherent as a potential major beneficiary of the ongoing AI growth. This is an addition to the increasing demand for high-performance optical components. But at the same time, the company faces challenges from increased competition in both the AI and optical communications sectors.

When it comes to Coherent’s market performance, it is enjoying a bullish moment, much like the broad stock market. Up 29.16% this year so far, COHR shares are currently trading at $123.70, at the time of writing – a new all-time high (ATH) that puts the company’s market capitalization at $19.20 billion.

Back in April, COHR shares had fallen to $50 as the stock market experienced a correction, and since then, Coherent’s shares have rallied about 146%. And just two years ago, COHR was trading under $30, representing a strong recovery.

With that, the company is delivering an EPS (TTM) of -0.62 and a P/E (TTM) of -198.72.

As for Coherent’s financial position, it reported a record revenue of $1.53 billion for the fourth quarter ended June 30, 2025. GAAP gross margin during the period was 35.7% and GAAP net loss was $0.83 per diluted share, while on a non-GAAP basis, its gross margin was 38.1% and net income per diluted share was $1.00.

For the full fiscal 2025, its revenue was also a record $5.81 billion. GAAP gross margin was 35.2% and GAAP net loss was $0.52 per diluted share, while non-GAAP gross margin was 37.9% and net income per diluted share of $3.53.

According to CEO Jim Anderson:

“We delivered a strong fiscal 2025 with revenue growth of 23% and non-GAAP EPS expansion of 191%. We believe we are well positioned to continue to drive strong revenue and profit growth over the long-term given our exposure to key growth drivers such as AI datacenters.”

During this quarter, the company began shipments of its 1.6T transceiver products, enabling high-performance AI datacenter applications. A new diamond SiC composite material was also introduced for advanced cooling of these datacenters.

Moreover, Coherent saw its first revenue from Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) and introduced the excimer laser platform that has been updated for high-temperature production of superconductor tape for emerging energy tech, like fusion. 

In the past couple of weeks, Coherent has released several new products, including an entire series of quad-channel ICs that allows for more efficient and faster optical transceivers for AI and cloud, the industry’s first QSFP28 Dual Laser 100G ZR solution to maximize capacity on existing fiber infrastructure, and high-power 400 mW continuous-wave lasers to meet the demanding requirements of co-packaged optics and silicon photonics applications.

Recently, Coherent demonstrated its next-generation 2D VCSEL and photodiode (PD) arrays to address the surging data traffic demands in modern datacenters.

A couple of weeks ago, Coherent entered into amendments, which include refinancing existing revolving credit commitments and increasing the total facility to $700 million, to its Credit Agreement with JPMorgan Chase Bank (JPM -1.52%) and other lenders, improving the company’s liquidity and financial flexibility to support operations and growth.

Conclusion

Columbia University has made an engineering achievement, showing how unexpected moments in science can lead to even bigger and better discoveries with the capability to redefine entire fields. By transforming a single messy beam into dozens of powerful, stable light channels, the team has laid the groundwork for the next generation of optical systems.

From revolutionizing LiDAR and shrinking quantum devices to boosting the capacity of AI-driven data centers, this technology represents a major leap in photonics integration. And as the world marches toward faster, more energy-efficient communication systems, compact frequency comb chips could form the basis of future computing infrastructure.

Click here to learn all about investing in artificial intelligence.

---

References

1. Gil-Molina, A., Antman, Y., Westreich, O., et al. (2025). High-power electrically pumped microcombs. Nature Photonics, 19(10), 873–879. Published 7 October 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01769-z