AIBRIEF
量引科技 (LiangYin Technology), the Zhuhai silicon photonics startup, is betting that AI's next infrastructure bottleneck will be solved by putting on chip optical transceivers directly on the GPU chip itself — a 1.6T (1.
As AI clusters push past the 1.6T-per-lane ceiling, the limiting factor inside a training fabric is shifting from compute to communication. The latest illustration is 量引科技, a Zhuhai silicon-photonics startup founded in 2024. It has taped out its first 1.6T micro-ring modulator (MRM) chip and closed an angel round in the tens of millions of RMB (low-single-digit million USD), led by 珠海科技产业集团 with 珠海正方集团 and 险峰 following.
The bet targets co-packaged optics (CPO) and optical I/O (OIO): putting the light engine on the GPU or switch package, instead of relying on pluggable transceivers that are running out of room at 1.6T. MRMs are micron-scale silicon rings that modulate light at roughly 1V drive, packing more channels into the same die area than the electro-absorption modulated lasers (EML) and Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) used in pluggable modules.
量引科技 pairs the MRM with self-developed temperature-control IP, plus an in-house silicon photonics process design kit (PDK) on a domestic mature CMOS node. Founders include former CUMEC engineering VP 李耀基, CTO 赵京雄 (ex-CUMEC, Cisco, Intel), and chief scientist Craig Peterson, ex-Intel Microelectronics Center general manager. The tape-out is in test, and the company says it has reached proof-of-concept with a leading domestic GPU vendor. Forecasts in the 36Kr exclusive, attributed to LightCounting and Yole, frame OIO as a potential hundred-billion-dollar market and CPO as the first segment to scale. Those are third-party projections, not facts.
Three engineering questions remain open: keeping MRMs stable across temperature swings, whether a self-developed PDK can match foundry-standard yield, and whether China's compute, photonic, and advanced-packaging lines can be coordinated the way Nvidia's stack coordinates them abroad. The round funds team expansion and more tape-outs, not a shipped product.