HyperLight is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that designs and manufactures photonic integrated circuits on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), a material prized for ultrafast, low-voltage electro-optic modulation. A 2018 spin-out from Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard, the company built what it describes as the industry's first high-volume, qualified 6-inch TFLN manufacturing line - now expanding to 8-inch - and packages it as a modular TFLN Chiplet platform. Its modulator chips target the bandwidth and power-efficiency demands of AI data centers, telecom optical networks and high-performance computing, enabling 1.6 Tbps-class links at CMOS-level drive voltages.
Mian Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of HyperLight, the Cambridge-based deep-tech company commercializing thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics. A Cornell-trained physicist who did his foundational work in Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard, Zhang took a notoriously hard-to-manufacture optical material and shrank it onto silicon-style chips - cutting signal loss roughly 100-fold in work published in Nature. HyperLight now runs the industry's first high-volume, qualified 6-inch TFLN production line and is pushing 400G-per-lane photonic circuits into hyperscale AI data centers through partnerships with UMC, Wavetek, and Jabil.