A shift to photonics for data center networks and AI is underway

By Sally Cole Johnson, Laser Focus (November 4, 2024)

Ayar Labs’ Terry Thorn, vice president of commercial operations, shares details about the company’s second-gen optical chiplet and light source—with engineering samples out in 2025.

Ayar Labs is pioneering a solution to the biggest bottleneck within artificial intelligence (AI) system architectures: High-bandwidth movement of data primarily between compute chips, such as graphical processing units (GPUs) or central processing units (CPUs).

Today, this traffic is routed electrically on copper. But the electrical architecture is rapidly approaching the end of its roadmap, and optical signaling offers a more sophisticated way forward. Chip-to-chip communications of the future will require photonics.

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