Report Forecasts Significant Shift Towards Silicon Photonics in High-bandwidth Data Centers
We are honored and pleased to announce that Ayar Labs has been designated as a ‘Cool Vendor’ in the 2021 Gartner “Cool Vendors in Silicon Photonics” report, which examines vendors in silicon photonics who are providing “innovative products to help accelerate performance without compromising other efficiencies and cost benefits.” The report highlights the growth of silicon photonics, noting that “by 2025, silicon photonics will be used in more than 20% of all high-bandwidth data center communications channels, up from less than 5% in 2020.” Among its key findings, Gartner analysts note that heterogeneous packaging “will drive adoption of silicon photonics in new use cases, such as high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), lidar and sensing.”
The recognition follows key developments for our company, kicked off by a $35 Million Series B funding round this past winter. In June, we announced a new milestone achieved by successfully demonstrating the industry’s first Terabit per second optical link – showing a fully functional TeraPHY™ chiplet with 8 optical ports running error free without Forward Error Correction (FEC) for a total bandwidth of 1.024 Tbps and at less than 5 pJ/bit energy efficiency. Additionally, we established an international subsidiary with Ayar Labs UK Ltd. in order to address the UK and European market demand for in-package Optical I/O, while adding two senior technology leaders to our team (see the release here).
“We are delighted to be recognized by Gartner as a ‘Cool Vendor’ in Silicon Photonics at a time when we are making great strides in our maturity as a company in a quickly emerging technology arena,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO for Ayar Labs. “From its inception, the mission and technology behind Ayar Labs, is incredibly cool. We are creating technology that aims to change the course of computing by shattering I/O bandwidth and power bottlenecks and enabling new architectural designs that will facilitate a new generation of systems and applications. Ayar Labs technology will disrupt performance, cost, and efficiency curves and create a new path forward for composable computing.”
We also recognize that to deliver the full potential of optical I/O, we must define efficient ways to bring optical technology to market and scale it quickly. From the beginning, we have worked closely with GlobalFoundries in pursuit of high-volume scalable fabrication and are the first to demonstrate working silicon on their next generation 45nm silicon photonics manufacturing process. We also realize that collaborating with standards organizations is critical for a sustainable ecosystem. We helped lead the formation of the CW-WDM MSA (Continuous-Wave Wavelength Division Multiplexing Multi-Source Agreement), a 45+ company consortium dedicated to defining and promoting specifications for multi-wavelength advanced integrated optics, and we are also active members of the CXL, OIF, IEEE and PCI-sig organizations.
We are happy with the significant milestones we have made thus far and look forward to sharing more announcements in the coming months. We also hope to connect with you at ECOC 2021 in September!
Gartner, ‘Cool Vendors in Silicon Photonics’, Anushree Verma, Bill Ray, Kanishka Chauhan, May 13, 2021
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