Has the era of co-packaged optics finally arrived?

Part 3: Co-packaged optics: Ayar Labs CEO interview

Mark Wade, newly appointed CEO of Ayar Labs, shares what his new role entails and why, after a decade-long journey, co-packaged optics' time has come.

Ayar Labs' CEO, Mark Wade

Mark Wade, the recently appointed CEO of Ayar Labs, says his new role feels strangely familiar. Wade finds himself revisiting tasks he performed in the early days of the start-up that he helped co-found. 

“In the first two years, I would do external-facing stuff during the day and then start working on our chips from 5 PM to midnight,” says Wade, who until last year was the company’s chief technology officer (CTO).  

More practically, says Wade, he has spent much of the first months since becoming CEO living out of a suitcase and meeting with customers, investors, and shareholders. 

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Teramount’s scalable fibre-attach for co-packaged optics

Part 2: Co-packaged optics: fibre-attach

Hesham Taha recently returned from a trip to the US to meet with leading vendors and players serving the silicon photonics industry.

“It is important to continue probing the industry,” says Taha, the CEO of start-up Teramount.

Teramount specialises in fibre assembly technology: coupling fibre to silicon photonics chips.

Taha is now back in the US, this time to unveil Teramount’s latest product at this week’s OFC show being held in San Diego. The company is detailing a new version of its fibre assembly technology, dubbed Teraverse-XD, that doubles the density of fibres connected to a silicon photonics chip.

Teramount is also announcing it is working with GlobalFoundries, a leading silicon-photonics foundry.

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A coherent roadmap for co-packaged optics

Is coherent optics how co-packaged will continue to scale? Pilot Photonics certainly thinks so.

Part 1: Co-packaged optics 

Frank Smyth

Frank Smyth, CTO and founder of Pilot Photonics, believes the firm is at an important inflection point. 

Known for its comb laser technology, Pilot Photonics has just been awarded a €2.5 million European Innovation Council grant to develop its light-source technology for co-packaged optics. 

The Irish start-up is also moving to much larger premises and is on a recruitment drive. “Many of our projects and technologies are maturing,” says Smyth. 

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DustPhotonics raises funding for 800G and 1.6T modules

• DustPhotonics has raised $24 million in funding.
• The start-up has taped out its 200 gigabit-per-lane optical chip.
• DustPhotonics expects the 1.6-terabit module market to ramp, starting year-end.

Ronnen Lovinger

DustPhotonics, which develops chips for transmit optical sub-assemblies (TOSAs) for 400 and 800-gigabit pluggable optical modules, has raised $24 million. The funding extends its Series B funding round.

"When you start ramping up products, you have to iron out the creases around supply chain, production, and everything else," says Ronnen Lovinger, CEO of DustPhotonics.

DustPhotonics has several customers and a backlog of orders for its 400 and 800-gigabit photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The company has also taped out its 200 gigabit-per-lane chip and will have products later this year.

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Drut tackles disaggregation at a data centre scale

• Drut’s DynamicXcelerator supports up to 4,096 accelerators using optical switching and co-packaged optics. Four such clusters enable the scaling to reach 16,384 accelerators.
• The system costs less and is cheaper to run, has lower latency, and better uses the processors and memory.
• The system is an open design supporting CPUs and GPUs from different vendors. 
• DynamicXcelerator will ship in the second half of 2024.

Bill Koss (L) and Jitender Miglani.

Drut Technologies has detailed a system that links up to 4,096 accelerator chips. And further scaling, to 16,384 GPUs, is possible by combining four such systems in ‘availability zones’.

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The APC’s blueprint for silicon photonics

The Advanced Photonics Coalition (APC) wants to smooth the path for silicon photonics to become a high-volume manufacturing technology.

Jeffery Maki

The organisation is talking to companies to tackle issues whose solutions will benefit the photonics technology.

The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to act as an industry catalyst to prove technologies and reduce the risk associated with their development, says Jeffery Maki, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks and a member of the Advanced Photonics Coalition's board.

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The market opportunity for linear drive optics

A key theme at OFC earlier this year that surprised many was linear drive optics. Its attention at the optical communications and networking event was intriguing because linear drive - based on using remote silicon to drive photonics - is not new.

Scott Wilkinson

"I spoke to one company that had a [linear drive] demo on the show floor," says Scott Wilkinson, lead analyst for networking components at Cignal AI. "They had been working on the technology for four years and were taken aback; they weren't expecting people to come by and ask about it. "

The cause of the buzz? Andy Bechtolsheim, famed investor, co-founder and chief development officer of network switching firm Arista Networks and, before that, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

"Andy came out and said this is a big deal, and that got many people talking about it," says Wilkinson, author of a recent linear drive market research report.

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