Articles from Ayar Labs

Ayar Labs, the leader in optical interconnect solutions for large-scale AI workloads, today announced the industry’s first Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™ (UCIe™) optical interconnect chiplet to maximize AI infrastructure performance and efficiency while reducing latency and power consumption. By incorporating a UCIe electrical interface, this solution is designed to eliminate data bottlenecks and integrate easily into customer chip designs.

Ayar Labs, the leader in optical interconnect solutions for large-scale AI workloads, today announced it has secured $155 million in financing led by Advent Global Opportunities and Light Street Capital to break down the AI bottleneck of data movement with its optical I/O technology. This brings the company’s total funding to $370 million and raises the company’s valuation to above $1 billion.

Ayar Labs, the leader in optical interconnect solutions for large-scale AI workloads, will demonstrate a broad range of optical I/O implementations for AI scale-up fabrics at its Supercomputing 2024 (SC24) booth (#810). The company’s optical I/O solution eliminates the inefficiencies, high power consumption, and increasing costs of copper interconnects and pluggable optics, revolutionizing the performance and economics of AI infrastructure. Ayar Labs will feature its technology in various AI infrastructure concepts with Fujitsu Limited, Intel Foundry, Corning Inc, Altera, and others at the event.

Ayar Labs, the leader in optical interconnect solutions that move data at the speed of AI, today announced the appointment of Pooya Tadayon as its Vice President of Packaging and Test. Tadayon was formerly a Fellow and Director of Assembly & Test Pathfinding within Intel’s Assembly and Test Technology Development (ATTD) group.

Ayar Labs, the leader in optical interconnect solutions that move data at the speed of AI, will present its latest technology advancements and ecosystem partnerships at the upcoming Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) Conference in San Diego on March 24-28, 2024 (booth #1511). Ayar Labs’ optical I/O solution will be on display at the event, including a demonstration of the industry’s first CW-WDM MSA-compliant 16-wavelength light source, which can drive 256 optical carriers for 16 Tbps of bi-directional bandwidth – a level of bandwidth essential for AI workloads.

Ayar Labs, a leader in silicon photonics for chip-to-chip connectivity, today announced two additions to its Board of Directors. Ganesh Moorthy, President and CEO of Microchip Technology Inc., and Craig Barratt, former CEO of Atheros and current Chair of the Board of Intuitive Surgical, will join the company’s Board of Directors. The company also announced that co-founder Vladimir Stojanovic has been named Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

Ayar Labs, a leader in silicon photonics for chip-to-chip connectivity, today announced the appointment of co-founder and CTO Mark Wade to serve as its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Wade succeeds Charles Wuischpard who will continue to serve in an advisory capacity over the coming weeks before he transitions out of the company in mid-January.

Ayar Labs, a leader in silicon photonics for chip-to-chip connectivity, will showcase its in-package optical I/O solution integrated with Intel’s industry-leading Agilex® Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. In demonstrating 5x current industry bandwidth at 5x lower power and 20x lower latency, the optical FPGA – packaged in a common PCIe card form factor – has the potential to transform the high performance computing (HPC) landscape for data-intensive workloads such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and support novel new disaggregated compute and memory architectures and more.

Ayar Labs, a leader in silicon photonics for chip-to-chip connectivity, today announced it has raised an additional $25 million in Series C1 funding, bringing its total Series C raise to $155 million. The oversubscribed up round was led by new investor Capital TEN. VentureTech Alliance also entered the Series C expansion that included participation by previous investors Boardman Bay Capital Management, IAG Capital Partners, NVIDIA, and Tyche Partners. Existing strategic and financial investors include Applied Ventures, GlobalFoundries, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, Intel Capital and Lockheed Martin Ventures.

Ayar Labs, a leader in the use of silicon photonics for chip-to-chip optical connectivity, today announced public demonstration of the industry’s first 4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) bidirectional Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical solution at the upcoming Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) in San Diego on March 5-9, 2023. The company achieves this latest milestone as it works with leading high-volume manufacturing and supply partners including GlobalFoundries, Lumentum, Macom, Sivers Photonics and others to deliver the optical interconnects needed for data-intensive applications. Separately, the company was featured in an announcement with partner Quantifi Photonics on a CW-WDM-compliant test platform for its SuperNova™ light source, also at OFC.

Ayar Labs, a leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, has expanded its executive team to further commercial development, with the addition of Lakshmikant (LK) Bhupathi, Vice President of Products, Strategy and Ecosystem, and Scott Clark, Vice President of Manufacturing and Operations. In these newly created roles, Bhupathi and Clark will focus on product management, manufacturing, supply chain, ecosystem and partner development to build scale for Ayar Labs’ optical I/O solution with new and existing partners and customers such as NVIDIA, Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lockheed Martin, GlobalFoundries, Lumentum, Macom, Sivers, and others.

Ayar Labs, a leader in 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 Warfare Center (NSWC), Crane Division to support the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Research & Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) Trusted & Assured Microelectronics (T&AM) program.

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 power of existing electrical I/O solutions. The new platforms could be used across Department of Defense (DoD) applications to capture, digitize, transport, and process spectral information.

Ayar Labs, the leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, is developing with NVIDIA groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure based on optical I/O technology to meet future demands of AI and high performance computing (HPC) workloads. The collaboration will focus on integrating Ayar Labs’ technology to develop scale-out architectures enabled by high-bandwidth, low-latency and ultra-low-power optical-based interconnects for future NVIDIA products. Together, the companies plan to accelerate the development and adoption of optical I/O technology to support the explosive growth of AI and machine learning (ML) applications and data volumes.

Ayar Labs, the leader in chip-to-chip optical connectivity, 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 strategic investors Applied Ventures LLC, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures. Other new strategic and financial investors participating in the round include Agave SPV, Atreides Capital, Berkeley Frontier Fund, IAG Capital Partners, Infinitum Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, and Tyche Partners. They join existing investors such as BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, Playground Global, and TechU Venture Partners.

In order to address the UK and European market demand for in-package Optical I/O, Ayar Labs has established an international subsidiary with Ayar Labs UK Ltd. Optical I/O has emerged as a key technology for future High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications worldwide. Hugo Saleh, VP of Business Development and Marketing at Ayar Labs, is leading these expansion efforts as the Managing Director of the UK subsidiary. Ayar Labs is also evaluating additional sites within Europe to support European customers and projects.

Ayar Labs announced today that it has successfully demonstrated 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 without Forward Error Correction (FEC) for a total bandwidth of 1.024 Tbps and at less than 5 pJ/bit energy efficiency. This is a major milestone in providing optical connectivity to meet the ever-growing bandwidth needs of data-intensive applications, low power interconnects, and new innovative heterogeneous and disaggregated system architectures.