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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Broadcom's first Jericho3 takes on AI's networking challenge

Broadcom’s Jericho silicon has taken an exciting turn.

Oozie Parizer

The Jericho devices are used for edge and core routers.

But the first chip of Broadcom’s next-generation Jericho is aimed at artificial intelligence (AI); another indicator, if one is needed, of AI’s predominance.

Dubbed the Jericho3-AI, the device networks AI accelerator chips that run massive machine-learning workloads.

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Data centre photonics - an ECOC report

• ECOC 2022 included talks on optical switching and co-packaged optics.
• Speakers discussed optical switching trends and Google's revelation that it has been using optical circuit switching in its data centres.
• Nvidia discussed its latest chips, how they are used to build high-performance computing systems, and why optical input-output will play a critical role.

Co-packaged optics and optical switching within the data centre were prominent topics at the recent ECOC 2022 conference and exhibition in Basel, Switzerland.

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Ayar Labs gets to work with leading AI and HPC vendors

Optical interconnect specialist Ayar Labs has announced that it is working with Nvidia, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning silicon, systems and software.

In February Ayar Labs announced a strategic collaboration with the world’s leading high-performance computing (HPC) firm, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Charles Wuischpard

Both Nvidia and HPE were part of the Series C funding worth $130 million that Ayar Labs secured in April.

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Nvidia's plans for the data processor unit

When Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, discussed its latest 400-gigabit BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU) at the company’s 2021 GTC event, he also detailed its successor.

Companies rarely discuss chip specifications two generations ahead; the BlueField-3 only begins sampling next quarter.

BlueField-3 die. Source: Nvidia

The BlueField-4 will advance Nvidia’s DPU family. It will double again the traffic throughput to 800 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) and almost quadruple the BlueField-3’s integer processing performance.

But one metric cited stood out. The BlueField-4 will increase by nearly 1000x the number of terabit operators-per-second (TOPS) performed: 1,000 TOPS compared to the BlueField-3’s 1.5 TOPS.

Huang said artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will be added to the BlueField-4, implying that the massively parallel hardware used for Nvidia’s graphics processor units (GPUs) are to be grafted onto its next-but-one DPU.

Why add AI acceleration? And will it change the DPU, a relatively new processor class?

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Compute vendors set to drive optical I/O innovation

Part 2: Data centre and high-performance computing trends

Professor Vladimir Stojanovic has an engaging mix of roles.

When he is not a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, he is the chief architect at optical interconnect start-up, Ayar Labs.

Professor Vladimir Stojanovic

Until recently Stojanovic spent four days each week at Ayar Labs. But last year, more of his week was spent at Berkeley.

Stojanovic is a co-author of a 2015 Nature paper that detailed a monolithic electronic-photonics technology. The paper described a technological first: how a RISC-V processor communicated with the outside world using optical rather than electronic interfaces. 

It is this technology that led to the founding of Ayar Labs.

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Habana Labs unveils its AI processor plans

Start-up Habana Labs has developed a chip architecture that promises to speed up the execution of machine-learning tasks. 

The Israeli start-up came out of secrecy in September to announce two artificial intelligence (AI) processor chips. One, dubbed Gaudi, is designed to tackle the training of large-scale neural networks. The chip will be available in 2019. 

Eitan MedinaGoya, the start-up’s second device, is an inference processor that implements the optimised, trained neural network.

The Goya chip is already in prospective customers’ labs undergoing evaluation, says Eitan Medina, Habana’s chief business officer.

Habana has just raised $75 million in a second round of funding, led by Intel Capital. Overall, the start-up has raised a total of $120 million in funding. 

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