Building an AI supercomputer using silicon photonics

•  Luminous Computing is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer 

Silicon photonics is now mature enough to be used to design complete systems.

So says Michael Hochberg (pictured), who has been behind four start-ups including Luxtera and Elenion whose products used the technology. Hochberg has also co-authored a book along with Lukas Chrostowski on silicon photonics design.

In the first phase of silicon photonics, from 2000 to 2010, people wondered whether they could even do a design using the technology.

“Almost everything that was being done had to fit into an existing socket that could be served by some other material system,” says Hochberg.

A decade later it was more the case that sockets couldn’t be served without using silicon photonics. “Silicon photonics had dominated every one of the transceiver verticals that matter: intra data centre, data centre interconnect, metro and long haul,” he says.

Now people have started betting their systems using silicon photonics, says Hochberg, citing the examples as lidar, quantum optics, co-packaged optics and biosensing.

Several months ago Hochberg joined as president of Luminous Computing, a start-up that recently came out of stealth mode after raising $105 million in Series A funding.

Luminous is betting its future on silicon photonics as an enabler for an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer that it believes will significantly outperform existing platforms.

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Books read in 2021: Part 4

In Part IV, two more industry figures pick their reads.

Michael Hochberg, a silicon photonics expert and currently at a start-up in stealth mode, discusses classical Greek history, while Professor Laura Lechuga, a biosensor luminary highlights Michael Lewis's excellent book about the pandemic, among others. 

Leonidas, King of Sparta 

Michael Hochberg, President of a stealth-mode start-up

One of the primary ways that I mis-spent my youth was by crawling through my father's library of social science and history books.  This activity generally occurred when I was supposed to be asleep, resting up for a full day of stark and abject boredom in school. This resulted in some perverse outcomes, like my tendency to fall asleep in class at an unusually young age.

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Elenion unveiled as a silicon photonics PIC company

•  Elenion Technologies is making silicon photonics-based photonic integrated circuits
•  The company has been active for two and a half years and has products already deployed  

A privately-owned silicon photonics company that is already shipping products has dropped its state of secrecy to announce itself. Elenion Technologies is owned by Marlin Equity Partners, the investment firm that also owns systems vendor, Coriant.

“We are in the [optical] engine business,” says Larry Schwerin, CEO of Elenion Technologies. “We are developing a platform leveraging silicon photonics but we have other capabilities.” 

Larry SchwerinElenion’s expertise includes indium phosphide, radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), packaging, and driver and control electronics circuit design. The RFIC expertise suggests the company also plans to address the mobility market.  

The company will detail its first products prior to the OFC show next March.

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Books in 2015 - Part 2

More book recommendations - Part 2 

Yuriy Babenko, senior network architect, Deutsche Telekom

The books I particularly enjoyed in 2015 dealt with creativity, strategy, and social and organisational development.

People working in IT are often right-brained people; we try to make our decisions rationally, verifying hypotheses and build scenarios and strategies. An alternative that challenges this status quo and looks at issues from a different perspective is Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko.

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The quiet period of silicon photonics

Michael Hochberg discusses his book on silicon photonics and the status of the technology. Hochberg is director of R&D at Coriant's Advanced Technology Group. Previously he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Delaware and at the National University of Singapore. He was also a director at the Optoelectronic Systems Integration in Silicon (OpSIS) foundry, and was a co-founder of silicon photonics start-up, Luxtera.

Part 2: An R&D perspective

If you are going to write a book on silicon photonics, you might as well make it different. That is the goal of Michael Hochberg and co-author Lukas Chrostowski, who have published a book on the topic.

Michael HochbergHochberg says there is no shortage of excellent theoretical textbooks and titles that survey the latest silicon photonics research. Instead, the authors set themselves the goal of creating a design manual to help spur a new generation of designers.

The book aims to provide designers with all the necessary tools and know-how to develop silicon photonics circuits without needing to be specialists in optics.

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