This month, the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) selected Xscape Photonics for its SCALEUP Ready program. ARPA-E is committing millions of dollars to assist in scaling up the production volume of our first WDM data center fabric solution, FalconX.

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We are honored to join the SCALEUP Ready program, and I want to explain why this milestone is important not just for Xscape Photonics, but for the future of AI infrastructure build-out in the U.S.

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Validation Among a Sea of Photonic Promises

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SCALEUP Ready is an ambitious program; its stated aim is to “fuel American energy dominance.” It is also a necessary program; the energy demands AI is placing on existing compute infrastructure are only increasing day by day.
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SCALEUP Ready isn't early-stage research money. The program exists specifically to fuel technologies that have cleared the hurdles of R&D, shown significant promise in real-world testing and are ready to be manufactured—and, ultimately, deployed—at scale.
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ARPA-E designed this program to minimize risk in a step that paralyzes many deep-tech startups: the shift from promising prototype to qualified, high-volume product.

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The silicon photonics industry is filled with legacy companies and startups making enormous claims regarding the ability of their technologies to one day usher in a new era of light-speed networking. If these claims do not soon turn into reality, customers will lose trust, the industry will lose credibility and momentum for adoption and collaboration will falter.

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ARPA-E’s funding validates that Xscape Photonics has taken a large step forward in developing this trust, furthering credibility and building momentum among our partners and customers.

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Why AI Data Centers Need FalconX

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At the center of this project is FalconX, our first product built on our proprietary CombX laser technology.

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AI clusters today face bottlenecks caused less by compute and more by how efficiently data is moved between accelerators, memory and racks. Copper interconnects in data centers today are quickly becoming obsolete, as their signal loss and excessive power consumption become harder to overcome as AI scales (we explore this problem of the “Copper Wall” in a previous blog post).

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FalconX is geared towards scale-up fabric in data centers to connect multiple GPUs. Unlike solutions that emit one wavelength per laser source, FalconX uses CombX technology to generate an entire spectrum of usable wavelengths from a single on-chip source. In doing so, FalconX consolidates what has historically been an array of disparate optical components into one coherent platform.

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ARPA-E’s funding will help us scale FalconX manufacturing in the U.S. alongside our partner, Tower Semiconductor, to help strengthen the domestic supply chain for the laser sources that next-generation AI data centers will depend on.

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You can learn more about FalconX on our website here.

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A Bright Future Ahead

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Alex, Yoshi, Keren, Michal and I founded Xscape Photonics because we foresaw a future in which high-performance computing and AI innovation are stunted by slow, inefficient and costly data movement within the data center. That future is here today.

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ARPA-E's support is specifically aimed at scaling the manufacturing of our multi-wavelength laser platform while simultaneously strengthening domestic capabilities in advanced photonics: exactly the phase our technology has now reached.

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