IN Brief:
- LumiCOMB packages Solinide's silicon-nitride microcomb technology into an orderable 2U, 19-inch instrument.
- The O-band version can deliver up to 24 usable lines above -5dBm at 200GHz spacing.
- The launch establishes a commercial development platform ahead of smaller integrated and co-packaged implementations.
Solinide Photonics has launched LumiCOMB, a turnkey optical frequency-comb generator that packages the Swedish company’s silicon-nitride microcomb technology into a 2U, 19-inch rack instrument for photonics and systems development.
The product is available to order in O-band and C-band configurations and gives R&D teams a multi-wavelength optical source without requiring them to assemble a bank of discrete lasers or maintain a manually stabilised laboratory comb. Solinide is targeting work in optical communications, co-packaged optics, RF photonics, metrology, and other applications that depend on multiple stable wavelength channels.
An optical frequency comb generates a series of evenly spaced spectral lines from one source. In LumiCOMB, those lines are created using Solinide’s ultra-low-loss silicon-nitride micro-resonator platform, with the system designed to reach a locked soliton-comb state through a single-switch operating sequence.
Solinide specifies up to 24 usable lines above -5dBm in the O-band at 200GHz spacing. The comb is delivered over a single polarisation-maintaining fibre with an FC/APC termination, while the company also offers custom line-spacing options. O-band and C-band versions are available for different optical-system architectures.
The attraction in communications work is the ability to obtain many wavelength channels from one source. Dense wavelength-division multiplexing increases fibre capacity by transmitting separate data streams on multiple wavelengths. A stable comb can supply those carriers with a defined frequency relationship rather than requiring a separate laser and control loop for every channel.
The current product remains a rack-mounted development instrument, not a co-packaged light source. That places LumiCOMB at a useful intermediate point: developers can evaluate comb-driven transceivers, optical engines, and measurement architectures with an orderable source while leaving the more difficult integration work for later generations.
Those later stages impose tighter restrictions on power consumption, size, thermal drift, packaging, fibre coupling, and lifetime. A comb source that behaves well in a controlled 2U instrument still has to preserve adequate optical stability when brought close to high-power compute devices and advanced semiconductor packages.
Solinide manufactures the instrument in Sweden and uses electron-beam lithography within its silicon-nitride photonics work to produce high-accuracy optical structures and support rapid prototyping. The company was founded in 2021 as a spin-off from Chalmers University of Technology and has combined microcomb development with photonic integrated-circuit prototyping services.
The commercial launch follows a €4 million seed round aimed at expanding production and commercialisation. That financing provided the backdrop to the company’s transition from a development-focused photonics business towards a supplier with a shippable product, but LumiCOMB now gives that transition a specific hardware specification and ordering route.
Solinide also describes a longer-term path from the rack instrument towards integrated and co-packaged solutions. That direction follows the wider semiconductor industry’s attempt to bring optical I/O closer to compute silicon as electrical interconnects encounter increasing bandwidth and power constraints.
The engineering gap between those two formats remains substantial. Rack equipment can accommodate dedicated thermal control, optical routing, and serviceable components that become much harder to preserve inside a semiconductor package. Manufacturing repeatability also becomes more severe when an optical source moves from laboratory quantities into tightly controlled, high-volume assemblies.
LumiCOMB gives developers a defined platform with which to test the optical side of those architectures now. Its commercial progress will depend on whether the multi-wavelength performance proves useful enough in development systems to justify the next integration step — reducing the same function from a 2U rack instrument towards the smaller optical engines envisaged for future compute infrastructure.
