Is $VUZI the newest micro-cap optical play? They are a smart-glasses company that have started shipping evaluation samples of an optical interconnect that can route up to 19,200 separate light paths across a distance of roughly 30mm. We know that as chips become more powerful, the electrical connections moving data around them have to run faster, which increases power consumption and heat. This is why the industry will be moving optical connections closer to the chips through architectures like NPO, CPO and eventually optical I/O. Vuzix’s approach spreads the data across thousands of light paths inside a thin waveguide. This is very early but they seem to be aggressively going after NPO and CPO. It is a pretty wild crossover, but there is a technical connection here. Vuzix has spent nearly 20 years designing waveguides and developing nanoimprint manufacturing to replicate extremely small optical structures at volume. The original application was smart glasses, while that ability to precisely route light at scale could also have a use inside AI infrastructure. This is what they claim: "As AI systems continue to scale, bandwidth is increasingly achieved through parallelism rather than speed alone. Traditional SerDes architectures push a small number of electrical lanes toward their physical limits, while waveguide-based optical architectures enable thousands of parallel channels that dramatically increase aggregate bandwidth, scalability, and energy efficiency." Will be keeping an eye on it! I just came across this news yesterday.