Thin-film lithium niobate integration onto silicon wafer substrates overcomes long-standing efficiency hurdles in data transmission

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-silicon-photonics-gained-powerful-ally.html

'silicon excellent for routing light/ poor at modulating it, overcome: lithium niobate allows for ultra-fast, low-loss switching and modulation that silicon cannot achieve alone... Tbps data rates on single chip... significantly less voltage, heat, power consumption... scalable: CMOS manufacturing compatible... photonic paths deeper within the server rack support massive LLM/ quantum computing interface computational loads without latency/ energy penalties of electrical paths"