Ayar Labs prepares for the era of co-packaged optics
Thursday, February 21, 2019 at 8:49AM The first of two articles on co-packaged optics.
Part 1: Ayar Labs
Ayar Labs is readying its co-packaged optics technology for scaled production in the second half of 2020. So says CEO Charlie Wuischpard who joined the start-up in late 2018 after it secured $24 million in funding to bring its products to market.
Co-packaged optics refers to the intimate coupling of optics with an ASIC in one package. Such tightly-coupled optics promises to overcome the growing system challenges associated with linking an ASIC’s high-speed signals to pluggable optics residing on a platform’s faceplate.
Charlie Wuischpard Wuischpard joined Ayar Labs from Intel where he led the supercomputing segment within the company’s data centre group. Wuischpard also led Intel’s disaggregated rack initiative.
“In both these, silicon photonics plays a huge role in enabling future architectures and future designs,” he says.
Ayar Labs raised its funding after demonstrating successfully its optical designs: a silicon-photonics optical chiplet, dubbed Teraphy, and its Supernova external laser source.
