Optical I/O is Here…
Have You Seen the
LIGHT?
Chip-to-chip communication is advancing at the speed of light.
Are you keeping up?
Major players from all over the technology map—AI, HPC, aerospace, data center, cloud, and telecom—are developing optical I/O (OIO) next-generation solutions to meet the growing bandwidth, power, and latency requirements of the most demanding applications. Discover how HPE, Intel, Lockheed, NVIDIA, Raytheon, and others are looking to in-package optical I/O to ramp up data movement, build composable architectures, and get that next million-X speed-up in AI.
Contact us at info@ayarlabs.com to learn about optical I/O use cases in your industry.
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Aerospace
Aerospace giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin see optical I/O advancing multiple SWaP-constrained applications like digital beamforming, phased array radar, and disaggregated airborne systems. For example, aerospace designers can architect disaggregated systems—placing sensors on the wings and nose of a jet and employing lightweight, EMI-resistant optical interconnects to quickly move data to processing units in the center of the plane.
LIDAR
Phased-Array Radar
Battlespace Interconnectivity
Enabling Data-Intensive, Real-Time Battlefield Communication: The Role of Silicon Photonics in Next-Gen
Converged-Sensor Platforms
Lockheed Martin Corporation is exploring converged-sensor system architectures as an alternative to siloed sensor systems. With this approach, platforms use high-performance radio frequency and electro-optic/infrared sensors for multiple tasks, shared across multiple systems.
Optical I/O: Designing the Future of Digital Beamforming and Antenna Arrays
Digital beamforming is the core technology driving advanced radar and communications systems for the aerospace industry. Digital beamforming, which uses a large number of elements in antenna arrays, enables faster, more precise, higher fidelity radar. Higher fidelity requires more elements generating more data. Only optical I/O from Ayar Labs can manage the quadratic increase in bandwidth density needed to deliver precise, higher fidelity phased array radar.
Cloud and Data Center
Major cloud and data center service providers are looking to optical I/O to deliver new innovations in system designs, such as disaggregated architectures that allow matching resources to workloads. Companies such as Intel, Google, and HPE see opportunities for multiple applications for their customers in terms of increased bandwidth, performance, and flexibility while reducing power consumption.
Disaggregated Architectures
Efficient Power Usage
High Bandwidth Memory
4 Tbps Optical FPGA Technology from Intel and Ayar Labs: Spend Your Precious Power on Compute, Not Connectivity
Sergey Shumarayev, Intel senior principal engineer/distinguished architect, shares how optical FPGA technology addresses socket power challenges for data-intensive applications like generative AI.
GlobalFoundries & Ayar Labs: Delivering Optical I/O for the Continued Rise of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Dr. Anthony J. Yu, VP, silicon photonics product management, GlobalFoundries, examines Ayar Labs’ and GlobalFoundries’ long-term partnership and optical I/O product roadmap. Dr. Yu also addresses how Ayar Labs’ optical technology unlocks the compute power necessary for data-intensive applications like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Artificial Intelligence
Optical I/O enables disaggregated architectures that decouple memory from processors and accelerators, allowing memory to be pooled with low latency and high performance. These new architectures provide flexible designs that can be shifted to meet the demands of ever-increasing AI workloads. NVIDIA believes optical I/O is a key technology on the path to its next million-X speedup in AI.
Machine Learning
Inference
Graph Analytics
Ayar Labs’ optical I/O unleashes the potential of next-generation AI compute architectures
Generative AI is enabling transformative outcomes, but model complexity is growing exponentially. Traditional interconnects create a bottleneck for data, forcing GPUs to remain idle a majority of the time. We need a new approach to generative AI architecture: optically connect nodes at scale so they effectively work like a single, giant GPU.
Ayar Labs’ Optical I/O Enables Disaggregated Architectures for Cloud, AI, and HPC
Disaggregated architectures are shifting the paradigm of innovation by enabling resource composability for more efficient utilization in Cloud, AI, and high performance computing.
High Performance Computing
Ayar Labs’ in-package optical I/O delivers up to 1000x bandwidth density improvements at one-tenth the power compared to electrical I/O. Future generations of HPE Slingshot, a high-performance Ethernet fabric specifically designed for HPC and AI solutions, plan to include optical I/O to deliver unprecedented bandwidth and speed, at lower levels of power and latency, to meet customers‘ growing demands for scale and performance.