Optical I/O: The Key to Unlocking AI Infrastructure, Profitability and Performance

[SPONSORED GUEST ARTICLE]  Scaling GenAI inference performance requires increasing the number of GPUs or accelerators working in parallel within the scale-up domain. In-package optical I/O offers a path forward by breaking the ….

HPC News Bytes 20240401: A $100B AI Data Center, Eviden Says It’s Healthy, Alibaba’s RISC-V Chip, New Optical Interconnect Group, Nvidia Fights CUDA Translation

Happy April Fool’s Day! It was as always an interesting week in the world of HPC-AI, this edition of HPC News Bytes includes commentary on: Microsoft and….

Photonic Fabric Company Celestial AI Closes $175M Series C

SANTA CLARA, Calif.– Celestial AI, creator of the Photonic Fabric optical interconnect technology platform, announced it raised $175 million in its Series C funding round led by Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology Fund (USIT). In addition to USIT, the round included participation from new and existing investors including AMD Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), Temasek, […]

PCI-SIG Exploring PCIe over Optical Interconnects

BEAVERTON, OR. – August 2, 2023 – PCI-SIG today announced the formation of a workgroup to deliver PCI Express (PCIe) technology over optical connections. The PCI-SIG Optical Workgroup intends to be optical technology-agnostic, supporting a range of optical technologies, while potentially developing technology-specific form factors. “Optical connections will be an important advancement for PCIe architecture as they will […]

Lightelligence Announces Optical Network-on-Chip Processor

Boston –– June 28, 2023 –– Photonic computing company Lightelligence has introduced Hummingbird, an optical network-on-chip (oNOC) processor designed for domain-specific AI workloads. Lightelligence said Hummingbird utilizes vertically stacked packaging technologies to integrate a photonic chip and an electronic chip into a single package serving as the communications network for data centers and other high-performance […]

Ayar Labs Demos Terabit Optical Link for Co-Packaged Optics and Chip-to-Chip Connectivity

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Ayar Labs announced today that it has successfully demonstrated what is said is the industry’s first terabit per second Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical link with its TeraPHY optical I/O chiplet and SuperNova multi-wavelength optical source. The demonstration shows a fully functional TeraPHY chiplet with 8 optical ports running error free […]

Ayar Labs Demonstrates Optical Interconnect Solution on GlobalFoundries’ Silicon Photonics Manufacturing Process  

Santa Clara, CA, Dec. 2, 2020 –Ayar Labs announced it has successfully demonstrated its patented monolithic electronic/photonic solution on GlobalFoundries’ (GF) next generation photonics technology based on its 45nm platform. This is an industry first and key milestone in providing chip-to-chip optical connectivity at scale, according to Ayar Labs, and is suited for data-hungry applications […]

Never Enough Bandwidth: Optical I/O Consortium Formed to Set Interconnect Standards

More than 20 companies have joined an industry consortium to establish specifications for multi-wavelength integrated optics – the emerging interconnect technology whose advocates say is critical to next-generation HPC and AI. Announced today, the CW-WDM MSA (Continuous-Wave Wavelength Division Multiplexing Multi-Source Agreement) Group, wants to build an ecosystem to work on common standards and interoperability for dense laser light sources, which in turn will enable broad adoption of optical I/O.

New Funding and DARPA Grant to Propel Optical Interconnects at Ayar Labs

Today Ayar Labs announced that the company has secured additional funding to fuel its growth as it drives to productize its TeraPHY optical I/O chiplets and SuperNova multi-wavelength lasers in 2019. The company aims to disrupt the traditional performance, cost, and efficiency curves of the semiconductor and computing industries by driving a” 1000x improvement” in interconnect bandwidth density at 10x lower power.

Ayar Labs Readies Optical Interconnect Silicon to Meet Industry Demand

Ayar Labs is leveraging its recent Series A funding to bring optical interconnect silicon to the Cloud, HPC, and Telecommunication markets. “We’re seeing significant industry interest in optical chip-to-chip connectivity– based on our assessments, the Total Addressable Market for inter-chip optical interconnect is 4x the optical transceiver market,” said Charlie Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs.”