en.Wedoany.com Reported - China's first provincial-level key laboratory in the field of optical computing—the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Optical Computing Chips and Systems—was officially inaugurated in Shanghai on June 10. Led by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and co-established with Lightelligence, a global leader in optical computing, the laboratory is planned to be located at the Zhangjiang Institute for Advanced Study of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It aims to leverage the advantages of optical computing technology to address the explosive growth in demand for computing power in the post-Moore era.
Currently, the global wave of artificial intelligence is driving an urgent need for computing power in areas such as large model inference, scientific intelligence, and advanced information electronics. While academia and industry continue to extend Moore's Law, they are also exploring new computing architectures. Optical computing, with its physical characteristics of high throughput, low power consumption, and low latency, is regarded as a key frontier to break through the computing power bottleneck. The Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission stated that Shanghai is promoting innovation and industrial cultivation in optical computing technology through project deployment, platform construction, and ecosystem development, while coordinating with the Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization to accelerate the application verification of optical computing in scenarios such as artificial intelligence and scientific computing.
The laboratory is headed by Professor Zou Weiwen, Dean of the Institute of Advanced Technology and Equipment at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with Shen Yichen, founder and CEO of Lightelligence, serving as the laboratory advisor. Shanghai Jiao Tong University has a deep academic accumulation in multiple disciplines, while Lightelligence, as a global leader in optical computing, released two generations of optical computing processors in 2021 and 2025 and has published multiple papers in the journal *Nature*. Over a month ago, Lightelligence successfully went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the world's first AI silicon photonics chip stock.
Zou Weiwen explained that integrated optical computing uses light as the data carrier, performing analog-domain computations through semiconductor-integrated programmable optical circuits. Compared to traditional electronic computing, optical computing can theoretically improve core performance metrics such as computing power, bandwidth, and energy efficiency by 2 to 4 orders of magnitude, and has a lower dependence on extreme advanced manufacturing processes. It can achieve performance equivalent to chips below 7 nanometers at the 40-nanometer process node. However, integrated optical computing currently faces two major integration challenges: at the chip hardware level, it must overcome the contradictions between physical layer losses, scale, and precision; at the application level, the lack of mature operator frameworks constrains hardware scheduling efficiency. The laboratory will focus on four key directions: computing architecture, integration methods, operator algorithms, and benchmark applications, with the goal of achieving an integration scale exceeding 100,000 units by 2035, forming a full-stack software ecosystem for optical computing, and driving the application market size to exceed 20 billion yuan.
The laboratory will adopt an open innovation philosophy, collaborating with universities, research institutes, technology enterprises, application units, and fund institutions nationwide to build an integrated support mechanism for projects, platforms, scenarios, and capital. Shen Yichen of Lightelligence expressed hope that outstanding enterprises in the industry will jointly participate in the construction of the laboratory, forming a collaborative innovation force in the field of optical computing.
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