
Shares in IQE rose as much as 10% in early London trade after the semiconductor company unveiled a new partnership to develop commercial quantum dot wafer supply chains for AI optical interconnects.
The Cardiff-based business said the partnership with Quintessent, a California-based optical connectivity solutions business, had been backed by an initial purchase order of $0.5m for delivery of production wafers to Quintessent through 2025.
IQE said the technology was a “critical innovation for future AI infrastructure which offer superior performance, including extended lifetimes, improved efficiency, lower noise and greater resilience to environmental fluctuations.”
“The rapid expansion of AI-driven applications has placed significant requirement in data centres power consumption driving the migration from copper chip to chip connectivity to Silicon Photonics. This has created an increasing demand for high-bandwidth, low-latency, energy-efficient and highly reliable optical interconnects.”…