- Data movement bottlenecks have raised the visibility and importance of serial-deserializer (SerDes) performance.
- Although a start-up, Eliyan seems more like SerDes royalty with a staff immersed in the technology, strong backing ($145M Series C, $1B valuation) and multiple relationships with leading chip companies and foundries.
- A bi-directional link is the key to the performance gains of its NuLink portfolio: 2x bandwidth, 2x efficiency, greater bandwidth density, and a smaller die size.
- The company is now expanding into scale-up optical with NuLight, a two-dimensional micro-VCSEL (2D µVCSEL) featuring 8x the bandwidth density, 5x the power efficiency and 50x the reach of copper.
- While third-party SerDes raises eyebrows, the expertise, performance, and more rapid time- to-market Eliyan offers will likely draw prospective customers.
Think of the NuLinkTM portfolio from Eliyan as the SerDes for all seasons.
Eliyan—which recently raised $145 million from investors that include Cisco Investments, Intel Capital, Arm, AMD, Meta, Coherent, Lumentum and all three major memory makers—says its NuLink PHY technology for producing high-speed SerDes can deliver market-leading performance to scale-in networks (die-to-die chiplet networks, XPU to HBM fabrics, CPU to DRAM fabrics), scale-up networks (chip-to-chip connections) and ultimately scale-out rack-to-rack connections.
NuLink can be obtained by customers as IP for advanced or standard packaging or as a fabricated semiconductor. Target markets include optical modules, near-packaged and co-packaged optics, Micro VCSEL and MicroLED arrays, custom HBM base die, switches, servers and other devices. 224 Gbps devices began sampling in Q1 2026 and will move into commercial production in 2027. The company works with four major foundries and the technology will be available at 5nm, 3nm and 2nm nodes.
Alongside NuLink, Eliyan is developing NuLight, its 2D µVCSEL optical interconnect technology. The two product families address complementary connectivity challenges: NuLink improves electrical data movement within and between chips, while NuLight targets the bandwidth, power and reach limits of copper in AI scale-up fabrics.
NuLight, according to Eliyan, provides the reliability, supply availability and low cost associated with electrical copper links while delivering 8x the bandwidth density, 5x the power efficiency and 50x the reach. The power-efficiency improvement corresponds to one-fifth the energy per bit, or an 80% reduction, relative to the copper-link comparison.
Source: Eliyan
In the package and on the board: the same core technology can be used for scale-in, scale-up and memory fabrics as rack-to-rack.
Most important of all, Eliyan claims it outperforms other SerDes with up to 2x the memory bandwidth, up to 4x more room for HBM in the package, greater bandwidth density and other superlatives.
Source: Eliyan
To learn more, contact Counterpoint Research to access our latest newsletter: Optics, Interconnects & Networking Monthly Supply Chain & Market Pulse Intelligence, Oct 2026.
Counterpoint’s Optics, Interconnects & Networking – Monthly Supply Chain & Market Pulse Intelligence tracks the technologies, vendors and supply-chain developments shaping next-generation AI data center connectivity.
Covering the ecosystem from substrate to rack, each edition analyzes scale-up, scale-out and scale-across interconnects, highlighting technology transitions, supply constraints, competitive dynamics and emerging opportunities.
Combined with Counterpoint’s quantitative trackers, the service helps clients understand how large the market is, who is positioned to capture it, why the market is changing and what to watch next.
