Introducing the Program – MicroLEDs for AI Infrastructure: The Optical I/O Opportunity.
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
Why Should You Join TechBlick's MicroLED Connect, AR/VR Connect and Optical I/O Connect?
The three co-located events take place on 16 & 17 September 2026 at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, bringing together the display, optics, semiconductor and interconnect communities in one venue: MicroLED Connect, AR/VR Connect and Optical I/O Connect.
For a decade, microLEDs were a display story. That changed when AI infrastructure ran into a wall: copper is efficient but short-reach, optics reach further but cost power and reliability, and neither scales the way AI clusters now demand. The "wide-and-slow" microLED architecture — many parallel, modest-speed optical channels instead of a few ultra-fast lanes — has emerged as a credible third option, and Eindhoven is where the people building it will gather.
In this article we highlight talks around the theme of microLED optical I/O for AI infrastructure: the architecture, the link budgets, and the devices that make it work. In companion articles we cover mass transfer and assembly, emitters and backplanes, yield and metrology, AR waveguides, light engines, and the system-level challenges of AI glasses.
Explore the full agenda now and register to join — one pass gives you access to all three co-located events, the exhibition, and the TechBlick on-demand library.
The Wide-and-Slow Architecture: Breaking the Interconnect Trade-Off
Microsoft (United Kingdom) – Paolo Costa frames the problem precisely: AI workloads, especially inference, are increasingly constrained by memory and network bottlenecks — a consequence of the fundamental limitations of current interconnect technologies.
Copper links are power-efficient and reliable but limited to very short distances, while optical links extend reach at the cost of higher power and lower reliability.
MicroLEDs combined with a wide-and-slow architecture have emerged as a way to break this trade-off, achieving low power, high reliability, and reach up to tens of metres simultaneously.
Realizing the vision, however, requires cross-layer innovation from devices, micro-optics and analogue electronics through to connectors, fibres, packaging and system integration — plus supply-chain scaling and interoperability standards. A talk that doubles as a call to the community.
Avicena Tech (USA) – Gregoire Denis presents a comprehensive framework for analyzing optical link budgets in microLED-based communication systems. Having pioneered microLED interconnects through the wide-and-slow approach, enabling low energy-per-bit operation and high-density integration, Avicena extends conventional link budget methodologies to account for the distinct properties of microLED emitters: limited optical output power, wide emission profiles, efficiency droop at high current densities, and strong dependence on device geometry. Particular attention goes to coupling losses, étendue constraints, and the trade-offs between optical power, modulation depth, and bandwidth.
Tera Electronics Corp. (Taiwan) – Solomon Chi introduces a manufacturable MicroLED Optical I/O platform targeting next-generation AI interconnects, from pluggable active optical cables and near-package optics to future die-to-die optical architectures. Conventional copper faces severe thermal, signal integrity and scalability limits at 224G PAM4 and beyond, while co-packaged optics and silicon photonics still rely on complex laser integration, cooling, DSP-intensive architectures and costly packaging.
The talk demonstrates sapphire-based high-speed microLED technology achieving approximately 1.9 GHz modulation bandwidth with CMOS-compatible wafer-level integration, integrating microLED arrays, photodetector arrays, driver/TIA electronics and image-fibre interfaces.
Mojo Vision (USA) – Nikhil Balram shows how a single micro-LED technology platform enables breakthrough applications across both displays and AI infrastructure. Built over a decade, this highly integrated, wafers-in/wafers-out platform brings together advanced 300mm silicon architecture, GaN-on-silicon emitters, efficient photodetectors, proprietary quantum dots, custom micro-lens arrays, highly multicore fibre bundles and software.
In displays it enables compact, high-efficiency systems that break conventional trade-offs in brightness, size and power; in AI infrastructure the same platform enables massively parallel optical I/O for chip-to-chip interconnects, dramatically improving bandwidth density, power efficiency and reliability.
Devices and Platforms: Making the Emitters Fast Enough
CEA-Leti (France) – Anthony Cibié addresses the medium-distance gap. Copper serves short reach and silicon photonics serves beyond ten metres, but for one to ten metres GaN microLED-based interconnects are a promising candidate — thanks to their development for microdisplays, GHz-level bandwidth, and capability to be miniaturized to the micron scale, enabling large-scale parallel communication between microLED and micro-photodetector matrices through fibre bundles. The talk presents CEA-Leti's latest figures of merit for both devices, the impact of temperature and high current density, and device modelling to support driver and TIA design.
University of California Santa Barbara (USA) – Steve DenBaars reports record-level external quantum efficiencies of 58% for blue micro-LEDs, 30% for green and 21% for red, enabled by novel epitaxial growth, optimized processing and transparent packaging — demonstrating the viability of monolithic full-colour III-nitride platforms. Crucially for interconnects, as device dimensions shrink and current densities rise, micro-LEDs exhibit exceptional modulation speeds: the work demonstrates a 3-dB bandwidth of 612 MHz at 1.4 kA/cm², corresponding to data rates approaching 1.24 Gbit/s under NRZ-OOK modulation, highlighting the dual potential for both high-brightness displays and high-speed optical communication.
ALLOS Semiconductors (Germany) – Burkhard Slischka argues that in both microdisplay and optical interconnect markets, superior device performance and strong IP are necessary but may not be sufficient for commercial success — the winners may ultimately be determined by manufacturing strategy and supply-chain scalability. Although these are fundamentally different markets with distinct requirements, they share remarkably similar manufacturing challenges. The talk compares both applications and explores why silicon-fab compatibility, integration with CMOS and silicon photonics processes, wafer-level manufacturing, and the ability to scale production rapidly may become the decisive factors.
Tyndall National Institute, University College Cork (Ireland) – Vitaly Zubialevich presents a micro-LED architecture for enhanced emission directionality in displays and optical interconnects — addressing one of the properties that most directly determines coupling efficiency into both waveguides and fibres, and therefore system-level power budgets in either application. The detailed abstract will follow in the agenda.
Emitters Built for Both Worlds: Display Innovations with Interconnect Impact
Two emitter talks from the MicroLED Connect program are equally at home here, because their device physics directly serves the interconnect case.
Aledia (France) – Pierre Tchoulfian's 3D GaN nanowire platform, grown on large-area silicon, is presented primarily as a display technology — but the nanowire architecture also introduces a disruptive approach to optical interconnects. By exploiting non-polar emission properties, the platform enhances carrier recombination dynamics, enabling high-speed modulation at reduced power consumption and positioning the technology as a key enabler for data communication systems requiring high bandwidth density and energy efficiency. (Full display-side coverage in our emitters article.)
Ingantec (USA) – Alan Yeung's talk on red InGaN microLEDs and monolithic full-colour integration explicitly extends beyond consumer displays: high-density, high-brightness native red and RGB microLED arrays are uniquely positioned for AI optical interconnects alongside AR and medical imaging — and the single-substrate architecture that bypasses mass transfer matters just as much for interconnect array manufacturing as for displays.
Join Us in Eindhoven
From data-centre architecture and link budgets to record-efficiency epitaxy and directional emitters, this is the most concentrated gathering yet of the microLED optical I/O community — alongside the display and AR ecosystems that share its supply chain.
Your pass covers all three co-located events — MicroLED Connect, AR/VR Connect and Optical I/O Connect — plus the exhibition, at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven on 16 & 17 September 2026.
