Lumotive Debuts ‘World’s First 2D Photonic Beamforming Chip’

Lumotive recently announced a chip that has been the holy grail of photonics for years: a programmable 2D photonic beamformer built entirely in a semiconductor. The device uses nanoscale optical antennas etched into a single silicon die to electronically steer light across two spatial dimensions without any moving parts. 

Lumotive's LM10 chip, released in 2023. 

For an industry that relies heavily on mechanical mirrors and rotating optics, Lumotive’s work represents a fundamental shift toward software-defined photonics.

Built on LCM architecture

The technology is built on Lumotive's Light Control Metasurface (LCM) architecture. A metasurface is a thin engineered material that reshapes how light behaves, or, in this case, through millions of tiny optical antennas smaller than the wavelength of light itself. 

When voltage is applied to specific antennas, they alter the phase of light passing through them. By controlling the phase across two dimensions of the chip, Lumotive can point a laser beam anywhere within a 160° field of view, expandable to 180° with additional optics. The steering happens in microseconds with no moving parts and no mechanical wear.

Lumotive makes LCM technology compatible with other LiDAR system architectures, including FMCW coherent lidar. 

The LCM approach is CMOS-compatible, meaning it can be manufactured on standard semiconductor production lines, and foundries can eventually produce these chips at volume and cost, similar to processors or memory. 

From the LM10 to 2D Photonic Control 

Lumotive didn’t get here overnight, though. In 2023, the company released the LM10 chip, a 1D beamformer that could steer light in one dimension. That was impressive, but, alas, incomplete. True photonics flexibility requires control in two dimensions, something researchers have theorized about for years but had not yet demonstrated in a manufacturable semiconductor form factor.

The jump to two dimensions required solving multiple challenges. The metasurface had to expand from controlling phase in a single direction to controlling it across an entire spatial grid, while the underlying silicon had to accommodate far more antennas and more complex control circuitry. Power consumption, thermal management, and optical efficiency all had to be engineered simultaneously. Lumotive set out to program light's behavior directly at the semiconductor level.

Applications Beyond LiDAR

LiDAR and 3D sensing have always been Lumotive's launchpad, and the company's earlier chips found homes in automotive and robotics, where solid-state scanning eliminates the fragility and cost of spinning mirrors. With true 2D beamforming, LiDAR becomes dramatically more capable because, in theory, a single chip can scan entire scenes with no moving parts, enabling higher resolution, faster frame rates, and smaller module sizes.

Lumotive leverages software-defined scanning, which can dynamically control range and resolution for real-time traffic monitoring.

Beyond LiDAR, Lumotive sees major opportunities in optical circuit switching for AI data centers. As data centers struggle with power consumption, photonic switching—routing optical signals directly between processors—sidesteps the heat and latency penalties of electrical switching. A programmable 2D beamformer could route thousands of light paths in real time. The company also targets photonic communications networks and optical computing hardware, where tunable phase control opens new architectures.

Lumotive is backed by $72 million in funding (Series B), including investment from Gates Frontier and Swisscom Ventures. The company, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, holds more than 160 patents. 

Launching This Year

The company's newly announced chip operates across three infrared wavelengths commonly used in LiDAR and photonics: 905 nm, 1310 nm, and 1550 nm. Lumotive plans to launch its first optical switches—purpose-built products for data center interconnect—by the end of 2026. That's a tight timeline, but the company has demonstrated the fundamental capability, and manufacturing readiness is no longer the bottleneck.

Once light steering is purely electronic, the control logic becomes programmable, updatable, and scalable; the laser beam ceases to be a dumb tool and becomes a component that responds to software commands.

2D programmable beamforming in a single semiconductor could also be a watershed moment for the photonics industry. It proves that complex optical behavior can be engineered into silicon and manufactured at scale. Lumotive's upcoming goals—optical switches in production, deployment in LiDAR systems, and integration into data center fabric—will test whether the technology can deliver on that promise in the real world.