Vuzix Corporation (NASDAQ: VUZI) has begun shipping its Causeway waveguide bridge samples to select prospective customers and ecosystem partners, marking the company's entry into the AI data center optical interconnect market.

The Rochester, New York-based company is also making a broader optical interconnect evaluation kit available for co-packaged optics (CPO) architectures. In its current demonstration configuration, the architecture supports evaluation of up to 19,200 parallel optical channels over an optical path length of approximately 30 mm.

The evaluation kit is designed to pair Vuzix's planar waveguide optical architecture with microLED emitter and photodetector test structures to support bench-level optical-path characterization, insertion-loss measurement, coupling and alignment studies, crosstalk evaluation, and packaging development. Vuzix is also developing waveguide samples for VCSEL sources.

According to TrendForce, the combined co-packaged optics and near-package optics market could grow from approximately $100 million in 2025 to more than $39 billion by 2030.

"This is our first step in applying Vuzix's optical expertise, waveguide design experience, and manufacturing capabilities to AI data center optical interconnects," said Paul Travers, President and Chief Executive Officer of Vuzix.

Vuzix designs and manufactures diffractive waveguides at its Rochester facility using nanoimprint lithography lines. The company said its technical foundation includes patent-pending compact planar optical architectures and high-precision replication of nanoscale optical features.