Ayar Labs raises $500M to mass-produce CPO chiplets

"Above 800 Gbps, copper interconnects are limited to a couple of meters and often require retimers to keep error rates from getting out of hand. Because of this, higher-speed copper interconnects, like those found in Nvidia's NVL72 systems, are usually constrained to the rack while pluggable optics are used for rack-to-rack communications."

"By integrating its TeraPHY chiplets directly into the GPU or accelerator, Ayar says its designs can support significantly higher bandwidth while using a fraction of the power required by pluggables."

"One of these reference designs was developed in collaboration with Alchip and uses eight of Ayar's next-gen TeraPHY chiplets. Combined, the company claims it can support more than 200 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth per package."

Ayar Labs, an Nvidia-backed silicon photonics startup founded in 2015, secured $500 million in funding to accelerate mass production of its co-packaged optics (CPO) technology. The company's TeraPHY chiplets provide an alternative to copper for chip-to-chip communications, supporting higher bandwidths over longer distances with reduced power consumption. Copper interconnects become limited above 800 Gbps, restricting them to short distances within racks. Ayar's integrated optical chiplets address this limitation by supporting significantly higher bandwidth while consuming less power than pluggable optics. The company has validated its technology through prototypes with Intel and DARPA, and recently collaborated with Global Unichip Corp and Alchip to develop reference designs supporting over 200 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth per package.

Read at Theregister