Singapore-based Staera Semiconductor, formerly New Silicon Corporation, has raised US$4.6 million in pre-seed funding to build optical data links directly into silicon chips.

In a statement on Wednesday, Staera Semiconductor said the round was led by Openspace Capital, with participation from SGInnovate, Black Kite Capital, 28 Holdings, In Group, and Decimus Technologies.

Staera Semiconductor highlighted the technology can help solve the bottleneck that limits the growth of AI systems, such as moving data between chips. Copper wiring can lose electrical performance sharply over the millimeter-to-meter distances that connect chips, boards, and racks. Its first product, Lightwire, replaces those copper links with light generated inside the chip, using the same process and wafer as the chip’s circuits.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data center electricity use can rise from about 415 TWh in 2024 to about 945 TWh by 2030. Staera argues that copper cannot carry more data further without using more of that power, but Lightwire is built for that task.

Lightwire sits inside the bridge or interposer chip that already links processors and memory in AI hardware, so it works with existing packaging. The company’s design targets include moving data using less than a tenth of the energy of today’s best optical links, and moving 24 TB per second on under 50 W, against nearly 1kW for co-packaged optics.

The round funds the move from research to a commercial product, with plans to expand the team into the United States and work with customers and supply-chain partners. The company is targeting a commercial release in 2030. I

Staera began as a spin-off from the Low Energy Electronic Systems research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.

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