HyperLight has been spun out from Harvard University's OTD to manufacture superior modulators for fibre-optic telecommunications networks.

Harvard University’s office of technology development (OTD) has unveiled US-based spinout HyperLight, which will commercialise research into modulators for fibre-optic telecommunication networks.
HyperLight will work on compact and efficient lithium niobate modulators, used by integrated photonic circuits to convert electronic data into optical information in fibre-optic cables.
By residing on a small chip, HyperLight’s modulator uses less voltage than current models, theoretically ending the need to install a bulky and expensive amplifier to draw sufficient power.
The technology originated from a study by researchers at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) led by Marko Loncar, professor of electrical engineering.
Loncar was aided by SEAS researchers including Mian Zhang, Xi Chen and Amirhassan Shams-Ansari, as well as Maxime Bertrand, a former visiting fellow at SEAS, and Sethumadhavan Chandrasekhar, for whom further details could not be ascertained.
Mian Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at the department, said: “Because a modulator is such a fundamental component of communication technology — with a role equivalent to that of a transistor in computation technology — the applications are enormous.”
“The fact that these modulators can be integrated with other components on the same platform could provide practical solutions for next-generation long-distance optical networks, data centre optical interconnects, wireless communications, radar, sensing and so on.”