Ayar Labs is a start-up company that aims to use novel silicon processing technology to develop high-speed, high-density, low-power "small chips" based on optical interconnection. Although the manufacturing process of transistors is still shrinking, the copper interconnection between transistors is still a major obstacle to the development of the electronics industry. And Ayar Labs' technical research direction is to replace the traditional I/O form.
It is reported that the resistance-capacitance delay (RC delay) based on copper interconnects is hindering the shrinkage and speed increase of transistors. Even with insulators based on shielding materials, copper is still not reliable enough at the microscopic scale.
Ayar Labs was co-founded by Alex Wright-Gladstein, Chen Sun, and Mark Wade in 2015 to develop new products that use light (rather than electrical signals transmitted through copper wires) to transmit data between chips.
The company claims that its solution originated from MIT's ten-year research cooperation, combining the technical research experience of the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Colorado, and the University of Boulder in semiconductor power/performance improvement, and has been supported by Lightelligence, LightOn and Lightmatter. Research incentives for startups.
Compared with traditional electrical signal transmission solutions, Ayar Labs' small chips and multi-wavelength lasers not only generate less heat, have lower signal transmission delays, and are less susceptible to changes in temperature, magnetic fields, and noise.
In addition, these small chips can increase the interconnect bandwidth density by 1000 times while power consumption is only 1/10, which is very suitable for the adoption of new system architectures such as AI, cloud, high-performance computing, 5G, and lidar.
For example, thanks to the multi-port design (eight optical channels), Ayar Labs' TeraPhy chiplet can theoretically achieve a bandwidth of tens of TB/s. At the same time, these TeraPhy have high-bandwidth electrical interfaces for switching with silicon chips.
Ayar Labs also designed a light source called SuperNova. This photonic integrated circuit can generate 8/16 wavelength optical signals, supporting multiplexing, power distribution, and amplification to 8/16 port output.
The company claims that SuperNova can provide 256 data channels of optical signals with a maximum bandwidth equivalent to 8.192 TB/s.
For system integrators, this smart optical I/O chiplet enables them to focus on the integration of core functions and process technology development, and at the same time delegate I/O tasks to low-power, high-throughput optical chiplets , And finally realize a new system form integrating logic and physical connection.
Finally, the B round of financing was led by Downing Ventures and BlueSky Capital. New investors included Applied Applieds, Castor Ventures, Downing Ventures and SGInnovate.
Existing investors also include BlueSky Capital, Founders Fund, GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures and Playground Global. At present, Ayar Labs, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, has raised more than 60 million US dollars in total.