TROY, Mich., December 20, 2022 – Altair (Nasdaq: ALTR) has invested $10 million in Xscape Photonics, a start-up that developed patented technology for photonic chips for ultrahigh-bandwidth connections inside data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) systems (see related story). In its announcement, Altair said, “Until now, computing leveraged a traditional electronic approach to moving vast […]
Silicon Photonics and the Hunt for an HPC Bandwidth Bottleneck Breakthrough
December 19, 2022 by
[SPONSORED CONTENT] “FLOPS are cheap, moving data is expensive.” In HPC circles this sentiment is heard often. There’s a growing sense that classical HPC systems and the advanced chips that power them are pushing up against their practical limits, that some foundational new technology is needed to build more balanced systems to achieve the next […]
Ayar Labs Wins $15M Optical I/O Contract from DoD
November 10, 2022 by
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Nov. 10, 2022 – Ayar Labs, a developer of chip-to-chip optical connectivity, was awarded a $15 million multi-year prototype Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) in support of Project KANAGAWA (the Co-Packaged Analog-Drive High-Bandwidth Optical Input/Output Project). The OTA, a non-traditional government contracting method for fast tracking research and innovation, was issued by Naval Surface […]
Lockheed Martin, Ayar Labs Partner on Microchip Connectivity for Sensory Systems
October 17, 2022 by
BETHESDA, Md. and SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Lockheed Martin, (NYSE: LMT) and Ayar Labs, a leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, today announced a strategic collaboration to develop future sensory platforms that leverage Ayar Labs’ advanced optical I/O microchips that use light to transfer data faster, at a lower latency, and at a fraction of the […]
Optical I/O Company Ayar Labs Raises $130M in Series C Funding
April 26, 2022 by
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – April 26, 2022 – Ayar Labs, a chip-to-chip optical connectivity company, today announced that the company has secured $130 million in additional financing led by Boardman Bay Capital Management to drive the commercialization of its breakthrough optical I/O solution. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA entered this investment round, joining existing […]
Canadian Start-Ups Receive US Air Force Grant to Investigate Platforms for Quantum Information
March 10, 2022 by
Montreal, March 10, 2022 – A recently awarded grant of $450,000 USD from the US Air Force Research Laboratory’s basic research office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) will enable two Canadian start-ups, Ki3 Photonics and Quantum Bridge Technologies, to explore highly-entangled states of light towards cutting-edge functionalities in telecommunications and computing. “We’re […]
NeoPhotonics Announces 53 Gbaud PAM4 Driver ICs for 100G and 400G Hyperscale Data Center Networks
March 8, 2022 by
SAN JOSE — March 8, 2022 – NeoPhotonics Corporation (NYSE: NPTN), a developer of silicon photonics and advanced hybrid photonic integrated circuit-based lasers, modules and subsystems for bandwidth-intensive, high-speed communications networks, today announced that it has shipped more than one million single and quad drivers for PAM4 transceivers used in hyperscale data center networks. NeoPhotonics […]
Ansys in Silicon Photonics Partnership with GlobalFoundries
March 7, 2022 by
PITTSBURGH March 7, 2022 – Ansys (NASDAQ: ANSS) announced it is collaborating with GlobalFoundries to deliver silicon photonics solutions., using photons — instead of electrons — to transfer and move data, supporting GF’s position in the optical networking space. GF Fotonix is GF’s monolithic platform, “the first in the industry to combine its differentiated 300mm photonics […]
HPE and Ayar Labs Partner to Bring Optical I/O to Slingshot Fabric for HPC and AI
February 24, 2022 by
HPC systems leader Hewlett Packard Enterprise and startup Ayar Labs, maker of chip-to-chip optical I/O connectivity, today announced a strategic collaboration to integrate silicon photonics within HPE’s high performance Slingshot fabric. Longer term, HPE envisions future generations of HPC systems interconnects significantly enhanced by optical I/O, which is a silicon photonics-based technology that uses light instead of electricity to transmit data. The technology addresses both the need for higher data rates and improved energy efficiency (see “Composable HPC-AI at Scale: The Emergence of Optical I/O Chiplets”).
Composable HPC-AI at Scale: The Emergence of Optical I/O Chiplets
December 13, 2021 by
The allure of “technology resource disaggregation” – a.k.a., composable computing – doesn’t get old. It’s an ingenious yet common-sense strategy for addressing our increasingly heterogeneous HPC-AI world where no single system can cost-effectively satisfy the range of workloads needed to be kept in play, each workload having its own unique combination of system requirements that would otherwise produce, in a single system, “marooned” resources that sap budgets. Put another way, with a composable HPC infrastructure there are pools of compute, memory, and storage resources enabling the dynamic assembly of customized nodes on a per-workload basis, offering configuration of “Goldilocks” solutions.
