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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Silicon photonics adds off-chip comms to a RISC-V processor

A group of researchers have developed a microprocessor that uses silicon photonics-based optics to send and receive data.

"For the first time a system - a microprocessor - has been able to communicate with the external world using something other than electronics," says Vladimir Stojanovic, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Vladimir Stojanovic

The microprocessor is the result of work that started at MIT nearly a decade ago as part of a project sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate the integration of photonics and electronics for off-chip and even intra-chip communications.  

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