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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
Cloud and Data Center
Artificial Intelligence
High Performance Computing
Telecommunications
Aerospace
Cloud and Data Center
Artificial Intelligence
High Performance Computing
Telecommunications

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.

Download Paper

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.

“Ultimately, we want to go to significantly smaller subarray sizes on our radars, towards digital beamforming. Optical I/O is a key to that as we integrate more advanced digital receiver technology into our systems. This could be a big boon for us in other areas where there are even more SWaP constraints, including airborne applications and missile applications. The ability to efficiently remote high-rate data from a digital receiver to another place in the airframe can be very important.”

Jack Holloway, Director Advanced Technology, Raytheon

“If you think about the fiber interconnects just a few years back, it would be impossible to implement fiber in a distributed way. Now, by miniaturizing PICs and integrating, the optical device becomes part of a multi-function system in package enabling decreased SWaP without sacrificing performance.”

Marc Angelucci, Senior Technical Fellow, Lockheed Martin

“As the complexity and amount of data grows on the battlefield, faster decision-making is essential. New innovative system architectures, coupled with AI and machine learning techniques, are needed for our customers’ mission success. Ayar Labs’ optical interconnect solution provides the necessary technology to process spectral information with greater speed and lower latency for next-generation system designs.”

Steve Walker, CTO & VP, Engineering & Technology, Lockheed Martin

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.

“We’re seeing rapid growth of data-centric workloads with an insatiable demand for bandwidth and the need to connect devices at hyper-scale distances. Optical interconnects are the ideal solution for many of these applications, and an optical I/O chiplet solution like the one provided by Ayar Labs for this project can achieve very high bandwidth at low latency and low power consumption.”

Vince Hu, VP of Strategy and Innovation for FPGA Products, Intel

"I think the first thing we need to get past is the limitations of copper. We pretty much understand that every time we bump up the speeds of the SerDes, the wires get shorter and shorter. And so, we're constraining and constraining and constraining our ability to compose and mix and match resources. So optical seems like a clear path, long term."

Bill Magro, Chief Technologist, High Performance Computing, Google

“This partnership between Intel and Ayar Labs is going to drive the bandwidth, the latency, the number of channels of communication, which will open up newer and newer applications in the industry”

Anil Rao, VP & GM Systems Architecture & Engineering, Intel

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.

“Optical connectivity will be important to scale accelerated computing clusters to meet the fast-growing demands of AI and HPC workloads. Ayar Labs has unique optical I/O technology that meets the needs of scaling next-generation silicon photonics-based architectures for AI.

Bill Dally, Chief Scientist and Senior VP of Research, NVIDIA

“We will need much faster interconnects because as models get bigger, and more compute and data is needed to train them, it’s necessary to scale out to many racks worth of machines. Interconnect bandwidth during scale-out is critical to preventing the accelerators from stalling while waiting on network transfers for either data or gradients.”

Christopher Berner, Head of Compute, OpenAI

“To get to a future state of ‘AI everywhere,’ we’ll need to address the crush of data being generated and ensure enterprises are empowered to make efficient use of their data, processing it where it’s collected when it makes sense and making smarter use of their upstream resources.”

Naveen Rao, VP & GM, Artificial Intelligence Products Group , Intel

“Over the past decade, NVIDIA-accelerated computing has delivered a million-X speedup in AI. The next million-X will require new, advanced technologies like optical I/O to support the bandwidth, power and scale requirements of future AI and ML workloads and system architectures.”

Rob Ober, Chief Platform Architect for Data Center Products, NVIDIA

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.

 

Composable Computing

Artificial Intelligence

High Bandwidth Memory

Optical I/O Chiplets Eliminate
Bottlenecks to Unleash Innovation

Ayar Labs is the first to deliver monolithic in-package optical I/O (OIO) chiplets, a new universal I/O solution that enables chips to communicate with each other from millimeter to kilometer-scale, at the power, latency, and bandwidth density of in-package interconnect. Several technology trends point to the arrival of OIO chiplets as a critical industry inflection point…

Download Brief

Scalable and Sustainable AI: Rethinking Hardware and System Architecture

In this webinar panelists discuss the challenges of scaling up AI workloads on existing architectures and the emerging solutions that can dramatically improve performance, efficiency, and scalability. Moderated by EE Times, the webinar features panelists from Ayar Labs, Google, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Tenstorrent.

Watch the Video

"Ayar Labs’ highly differentiated technology is crucial to supporting the high-performance computing architectures of the future. Ayar Labs represents a strategic investment opportunity for HPE to help our customers more efficiently derive greater insights and value from their data."

Paul Glaser, VP and Head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, HPE’s venture arm.

“Today, we know what technologies are necessary for the first and second generation of Exascale platforms in the 2022 to 2023 timeframe, but after that a crossover to optical I/O based solutions will be needed.”

Matt Leininger, Deputy for Advanced Technology Projects, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

"By partnering with Ayar Labs, we will advance innovation for the HPC and AI markets, and leverage their expertise in optical I/O in future generations of HPE Slingshot to deliver unprecedented bandwidth and speed, at lower levels of power and latency, to meet requirements for growing demands in scale and performance."

Justin Hotard, SVP & GM, HPC and AI, HPE.

Telecommunications

Optical I/O is also key for digital beamforming in telecom applications. Digital beamforming uses a large number of elements in antenna arrays to generate tightly directed beams for communication. OIO enables more elements in each antenna as well as more antennas in the same footprint to move a quadratic increase in data.

5G+

Increased Bandwidth

Beamforming

Five Key Factors Driving the
Need for Optical I/O in Telecommunications

Telecommunications has rapidly changed over the last 20 years, with no end in sight. The field has gone from point-to-point communication for connected homes and offices to people connected virtually anywhere…

Read More

Expanding Bandwidth and Flexibility for Telecommunications Using Optical I/O

As 5G networking transforms the telecommunications industry and next-generation 6G is close at hand, the need for increased bandwidth across wireless and wired infrastructure components has become obvious…

Download Brief

“What they’ve done is unique in terms of the level of integration and WDM. How they did the implementation, getting the chiplet so small, comes from the Ayar Labs proprietary technology for the modulators and detectors, which are quite tightly packed compared with traditional Mach-Zehnder modulators.”

Bob Wheeler, Principal Analyst, The Linley Group

"First of all, the top application is improving internet bandwidth. With data streaming, you send something different to everyone at a high data rate, which is a huge effort in terms of service. We need large bandwidth to support a huge amount of traffic. So, the main application today is to open the possibility for access to a number of high-level services, low-level services, services offered individually at any time, anywhere, at high speed."

Marco Romagnoli, Head of Advanced Technologies, CNIT, Pisa

"The idea is to move the interconnects from the front panel directly into the same package, reducing the cost of the electronics. In this way, you simplify all the conditioning electronics, you reduce power consumption, and you reduce signal loss. You can also increase the bandwidth density per square centimeter. So, in the same footprint, you can have more optical I/O ports at higher speed.”

Marco Romagnoli, Head of Advanced Technologies, CNIT, Pisa

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