TeraPHY™ Optical I/O Chiplet
Optimized for AI: Industry-First Optical I/O Chiplet for Scale-Up AI Fabrics
TeraPHY High-Density Electronic-Photonic Chiplet
The TeraPHY™ optical I/O chiplet is a small-footprint, low-power, low-latency, high-bandwidth alternative to copper backplane and pluggable optics communications. The TeraPHY chiplet’s modular multiport design can carry up to 16 light channels per port (the equivalent of an x8 PCIe Gen6 link). This industry-first optical I/O chiplet combines silicon photonics with standard CMOS manufacturing processes. It fits into existing system-in-package architectures and is compliant with the UCIe standard for in-package die-to-die and off-package interconnect.
Key Features
Bandwidth
bi-directional
Latency
per chiplet; does not include optical time-of-flight in fiber
Bit Error Rate
BER <1e-12
Reach
package-to-package connections
Full roadmap and technical details available under NDA. Specifications are preliminary and subject to change.
Technical Features
- Supports UCIe standard package electrical interface
- 8 full-duplex optical ports
- 16 WDM transceiver slices per optical port
- 512 Gbps per port (4 Tbps per chiplet)
- NRZ modulation format on the optical port—no forward error correction (FEC) required
- Configurable crossbar to map electrical channels to optical ports
Unleash AI Scale-Up Performance and Profitability with Optical I/O
Ayar Labs’ optical I/O solution, optimized for AI, combines TeraPHY optical I/O chiplets with Ayar Labs’ SuperNova™ multi-wavelength light source to drive multi-terabit throughput directly out of a GPU, CPU, or other accelerator package. Optical I/O delivers 5x–10x higher bandwidth at 10x lower latency and 4x–8x more power efficiency compared to traditional interconnects (pluggable optics + electrical SerDes).
This combination of performance and efficiency enables GPUs and other accelerators to communicate with each other across a wide range of distances, from millimeters to kilometers. They effectively function as a single, giant GPU. Optical I/O enables terabit data rates from die to die and across data centers at only a fraction of the power for faster, cost-effective, and more flexible AI and data center system designs.