LightSpeed Photonics Plans India Packaging Pilot Line, Targets 50% Local Production by 2028

LightSpeed Photonics is preparing to establish a photonics-packaging pilot line in India as part of a broader plan to shift a significant portion of its production closer to its Hyderabad-based research and development operations. The Singapore-headquartered deep-tech company aims to bring at least 50% of its production to India by 2028 while continuing to develop optical interconnect technologies for artificial-intelligence and high-performance-computing data centres.

LightSpeed Photonics has said that the initial facility will support its own research and development requirements before potentially expanding towards commercial-scale production.

The move is significant because the company currently carries out design, simulation and testing in India, while much of its assembly and fabrication work is undertaken in Singapore. Bringing more packaging and production activity into India could shorten development cycles, improve coordination between engineering and manufacturing teams and create a foundation for domestic photonics manufacturing.

Pilot Line to Begin With Internal R&D

The proposed pilot line will initially be used for LightSpeed Photonics’ own research and development activities rather than operating immediately as a large-volume manufacturing facility. The objective is to bring design, testing, assembly and packaging closer together so that new products can move through engineering and validation cycles more quickly.

At present, the company’s Indian operations are focused primarily on design, simulation and testing, while physical assembly and fabrication remain concentrated in Singapore. This separation increases the time required to move prototypes between development stages and can slow down repeated engineering iterations.

By establishing a packaging pilot line in India, LightSpeed Photonics could create a more integrated development environment where product changes can be tested and validated closer to the engineering team. The company also sees the facility as a possible stepping stone towards larger-scale manufacturing if customer demand reaches sufficient volumes.

Fifty Percent Local Production Targeted by 2028

LightSpeed Photonics has set a target of bringing at least 50% of its production to India by 2028. The localisation effort is expected to focus primarily on assembly, advanced packaging and testing, which are areas where the company believes India can build meaningful capability.

The shift would represent a significant change from LightSpeed’s current manufacturing structure, where much of the physical production work is carried out in Singapore. Moving these functions closer to the Hyderabad R&D base could reduce turnaround times and improve coordination between design and manufacturing.

However, the company does not expect the entire supply chain to become domestic. Critical unpackaged semiconductor dies, lasers, amplifiers and other specialised components are expected to continue coming from international suppliers. The India strategy is therefore centred on creating domestic capability in packaging, assembly and testing rather than duplicating the complete upstream photonics supply chain.

Photonics Packaging at the Centre of the Expansion

Photonics packaging involves integrating semiconductor chips with lasers, optical components, fibres and other devices needed to transmit information using light. It is one of the more technically demanding stages of photonics manufacturing because electrical, optical, mechanical and thermal characteristics must all work together within a compact package.

The technology is becoming increasingly important for artificial-intelligence and high-performance-computing data centres, where very large amounts of data must move rapidly between processors, memory and networking systems.

As data rates rise, conventional electrical interconnects based on copper face increasing limitations in terms of power consumption, signal degradation and transmission distance. Optical links offer an alternative by moving information through light rather than relying entirely on electrical signals.

LightSpeed Photonics is developing products specifically for this transition.

Near-Packaged Optics Forms the Core Technology Approach

LightSpeed Photonics is pursuing a near-packaged optics architecture rather than relying solely on traditional pluggable optical modules or fully co-packaged optics.

In conventional data-centre systems, electrical signals often travel across a circuit board before reaching a pluggable optical transceiver. At very high data rates, these longer electrical paths can consume more power and become increasingly difficult to manage because of signal degradation.

Co-packaged optics addresses this issue by placing optical components very close to, or within the same package as, the primary processor. While this approach can improve efficiency, it also requires substantial changes to processor packaging and system architecture.

LightSpeed’s near-packaged approach places the optical component close to the processor on the circuit board without integrating it directly into the processor package. This can reduce electrical path lengths while avoiding some of the design complexity associated with fully co-packaged optics.

Built for AI and High-Performance Computing Data Centres

LightSpeed Photonics is targeting the growing bandwidth demands of artificial-intelligence and high-performance-computing infrastructure. Modern AI clusters connect large numbers of accelerators and processors that must continuously exchange huge volumes of data, making interconnect performance a critical part of overall system efficiency.

As these clusters scale, the energy required simply to move data between processors becomes a significant part of total data-centre power consumption. Optical interconnects can help reduce some of these losses by replacing longer electrical links with high-speed optical connections.

The company’s current transceiver platform operates at 400 gigabits per second while consuming less than two watts, according to LightSpeed. Customer evaluation and board-level integration work are already underway as the company moves its products towards broader qualification.

Customer Pilots Underway

LightSpeed Photonics currently has four customer pilots underway and aims to expand that number to at least 12 by the end of the current financial year.

The pilot customers include semiconductor companies and manufacturers of servers, network-interface cards and switches, with most of the current activity concentrated in the United States. The company has not publicly identified the participants.

Such pilots are essential because near-packaged optical systems must be integrated directly into customer hardware. Unlike standard plug-in modules, these products require closer coordination with board design, system architecture and thermal management.

LightSpeed estimates that pilot programmes can take six to nine months before they progress towards larger-volume production orders.

Commercial Production to Follow Qualification

LightSpeed Photonics expects to announce reliability-testing results and production-readiness milestones at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles in March 2027.

The company is targeting the start of commercial revenue by the end of the current financial year. It had initially indicated a revenue target of around US$3 million for 2027-28, although this could increase if customer qualification and contract-manufacturing scale-up progress faster than expected.

Indian Manufacturing Requires Market Scale

LightSpeed Photonics has also highlighted a broader challenge facing photonics manufacturing in India: specialised factories require sufficient order volumes to justify investment.

A single startup is unlikely to generate enough demand to support a large dedicated manufacturing line. For photonics packaging to become commercially sustainable in India, multiple companies will need to create recurring production volumes large enough to support contract manufacturers and specialised suppliers.

The company has therefore argued that India should aim to build production volumes in the hundreds of thousands or millions of units over time rather than focus only on low-volume assembly.

Such scale would be necessary to attract suppliers of optical components, packaging equipment, testing systems and precision manufacturing services.

Data-Centre Expansion Could Create Domestic Demand

LightSpeed sees India’s growing data-centre market as a potential long-term source of demand for optical interconnect technologies.

Large AI and cloud-computing facilities require thousands of optical links to connect servers, accelerators, switches and storage systems. As domestic data-centre capacity expands, the number of optical transceivers and related interconnect components required could increase substantially.

The opportunity is particularly relevant to AI infrastructure because these systems require much denser and faster internal connectivity than conventional enterprise computing environments.

Hyderabad R&D Base Gives India a Starting Point

LightSpeed Photonics already maintains a research and development base in Hyderabad, giving the company an existing engineering foundation around which manufacturing activity could expand.

The Indian team works on design, simulation and testing of the company’s optical interconnect products, while much of the physical assembly and fabrication remains in Singapore.

Bringing packaging closer to the Hyderabad engineering base could reduce development time because design changes, prototype assembly and testing could be completed within the same broader ecosystem.

This is especially important in photonics, where optical alignment, electrical performance, thermal behaviour and mechanical design must all be optimised together.

Company Focused on Data-Movement Bottlenecks

LightSpeed Photonics was founded in 2021 to develop compact optical interconnect solutions for bandwidth-intensive computing applications. The company is headquartered in Singapore while maintaining a significant R&D presence in Hyderabad.

Its technology is aimed at semiconductor companies, original equipment manufacturers, original design manufacturers and data-centre system developers.

The company has also raised external funding to support product development, customer qualification and preparations for commercial manufacturing, giving it the capital base required to move from engineering prototypes towards larger-scale deployment.

Photonics Could Become a Strategic Deep-Tech Segment

Photonics is becoming increasingly important as computing systems face the energy and bandwidth limitations of conventional electrical interconnects.

The challenge is particularly acute in AI infrastructure, where hundreds or thousands of processors must exchange data at very high speeds. As these systems grow, interconnect power consumption becomes a major constraint.

India already has strong semiconductor-design and software capabilities, but photonics packaging remains a relatively specialised manufacturing segment. Developing domestic capability in this area could help India participate in an emerging technology that is likely to become increasingly important to AI, cloud computing and high-performance computing.

A pilot production line would therefore have significance beyond LightSpeed Photonics itself by helping build technical expertise, supply-chain knowledge and manufacturing experience in optical interconnect packaging.

From R&D Presence to Manufacturing Footprint

LightSpeed Photonics’ India strategy represents a gradual shift from a research-focused presence towards a more integrated design-and-manufacturing model.

The company is not attempting to relocate its entire supply chain to India immediately. Critical semiconductor dies, lasers and optical components will continue to come from global suppliers, while localisation will initially focus on assembly, packaging and testing.

Even so, bringing at least half of production to India by 2028 would represent a significant expansion of LightSpeed’s domestic operations.

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References

1. The Economic Times — LightSpeed Photonics Plans Packaging Pilot Line in India, Eyes 50% Local Production by 2028, 18 September 2026
   https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ai/ai-insights/lightspeed-photonics-plans-packaging-pilot-line-in-india-eyes-50-local-production-by-2028-says-ceo-rohin-y/articleshow/134320982.cms
2. LightSpeed Photonics — Corporate Website
   https://lightspeedphotonics.com/
3. LightSpeed Photonics — Optical Interconnect Technology and Product Information
   https://lightspeedphotonics.com/

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