Optical startup Ayar Labs has been selected as Intel’s optical I/O solution partner for their recently awarded DARPA PIPES research project. “The goal of PIPES (Photonics in Package for Extreme Scalability) is to develop integrated optical I/O solutions co-packaged with next generation FPGA/CPU/GPU and accelerators in Multi-Chip Packages (MCP) to provide extreme data rates (input/output) at ultra-low power over much longer distances than supported by current technology. In the first phase of the project, the Ayar Labs TeraPHY chiplet will be co-packaged with an Intel FPGA using the AIB (Advanced Interconnect Bus) interface and Intel’s EMIB silicon-bridge packaging.”