Chipsens brings 416-mirror chip to market for optical switching

A silicon package no thicker than roughly 0.66 millimeters holds 416 independently rotating micromirrors. Suzhou Chipsens Technology brought the standard component to market in August 2026, giving builders a ready-made core for optical circuit switching rather than requiring them to develop the micromirror array from scratch.

OCS routes data as light. That avoids the electrical-to-optical conversions used in electronic switching, a design that can deliver high bandwidth with low latency. The technology is gaining ground as artificial-intelligence clusters move toward supernode architectures and faster links: Google equips its seventh-generation TPU Ironwood clusters with more than 2,000 OCS switches each, while NVIDIA’s Spectrum-XGS is aiming to build an Ethernet ecosystem around optical switching.

MEMS, short for microelectromechanical systems, is the most mature of several competing approaches, alongside digital liquid-crystal, piezoelectric and optical-waveguide designs. It holds more than 70 percent of the OCS market, according to Pandaily’s report, because it balances port expansion with cost. Google and Lumentum both use the MEMS route.

Chipsens reports a deflection angle of plus or minus 6.5 degrees on the X axis and 5.5 degrees on the Y axis, infrared reflectivity of at least 96 percent, a response time under 10 milliseconds and a cycle life exceeding one billion cycles. The chip supports products with 400 by 400 ports, and the company says its mass-production yield is better than 90 percent. Chipsens had tape-outed a large-array micromirror for a 320 by 320 channel OCS in 2025.

Concretely, customers in AI data centers and core networks can use the standard chip to assemble customized optical-switching systems more quickly. Chipsens says optical-domain switching could reduce data-center energy use by about 40 percent, including in reconfigurable optical layers for 100,000-card training clusters. That remains a company-stated potential, not an independently published field measurement; the next step it gives for itself is scaling toward 1024 by 1024 ports after funding led by SMIC Capital to expand micromirror capacity and develop next-generation products.