The age of chips connected via beams of light is upon us, according to Charles Wuischpard, chief executive of Silicon Valley startup Ayar Labs, which has received $35 million in new funding[1], bringing its total funding to date to roughly $60 million.
Silicon photonics, the long-promised age of chips that do away with copper wires, is coming into focus as massively parallel computer systems require a way to simplify the wiring that joins multiple chips together.
"What if every Xeon CPU in the data center was optically connected versus through copper on the motherboard today?" Wuischpard offered, in an interview with ZDNet via Zoom.
"Nvidia spends a lot of money putting sixteen GPUs in their DGX box," Wuischpard continued. "But in order to expand, and have maybe 256 GPUs addressable in a box, you're going to need to go to an optical interconnect to enable that."
New investors in the Series B round inclue Applied Ventures, the venture capital arm of chip equipment giant Applied Materials; Castor Venures; and Downing Ventures. They join existing investors Intel, Lockheed Martin, Global Foundries, BlueSky Capital, and Playground Global.
Wuischpard knows a thing or two about both optical and massively parallel computing. He ran the supercomputing unit at Intel for several years before coming on board Ayar at the end of 2018. Intel is an investor and a customer, and to some extent, a potential competitor, given that Intel has its own silicon photonics efforts.
Ayar, which was founded by MIT scholars in 2015, has done pioneering work in converting electrical