Ayar Labs has announced the first public demonstration of its optical I/O technology at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) in San Diego on March 5-9, 2023.
Delivered in a compact, co-packaged CMOS chiplet, the new solution provides 4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) bidirectional Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) for networking and connectivity in data-intensive applications. Delivered in a compact, co-packaged CMOS chiplet, optical I/O technology could become the foundation of data centres supporting applications that include; AI/HPC data centres, disaggregated data centres, dense 6G telecommunications systems, and phased array sensory systems.
Craig Thompson, Vice President of Business Development for Networking at Nvidia, comments: “In-package optical I/O solutions have the potential to transform how semiconductor, AI, HPC and aerospace customers process their next-generation, data-intensive workloads.
At OFC, Ayar Labs will have its first public demonstration showing its optical I/O solution moving data from one TeraPHY optical I/O chiplet to another at 2.048 Tbps in each direction - powered by the company's SuperNova light source. SuperNova powers eight fibre links (using 64 highly accurate wavelengths operating at 32 Gbps, for eight wavelengths and 256 Gbps per individual fibre) running error free at lower than 10ns of latency and without needing Forward Error Correction (FEC). This allows for a bandwidth of 2.048 Tbps in each direction or 4.096 Tbps bidirectional.
More importantly, the data transfer uses less than five pJ/bit (10W). This level of energy efficiency can provide the power density and performance per watt needed to achieve AI models with trillions of parameters or to support the development of advanced HPC systems.
Ayar Labs has achieved this latest milestone in partnership with high-volume manufacturing and supply partners, including GlobalFoundries, Lumentum, Macom, Sivers Photonics.
Charlie Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs, stated: “Ayar Labs continues to showcase our technology leadership with this live silicon demonstration, an industry-first milestone on the path to overcoming the impending power and performance wall of electrical design, and unleashing the power of next-generation compute. As we bring together all the supply, manufacturing, test and compute pieces needed for high-volume deployment, we also show today that we continue to lead in pure technical achievement.”
Ayar Labs was also featured in an announcement with partner Quantifi Photonics on a CW-WDM-compliant test platform for its SuperNova light source, also at OFC in 2023.
In 2022, Ayar Labs Hugo Saleh discussed the firm's plans following news that the company had secured $130 million in additional funding.
