HPC > Silicon Photonics
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The technology also has the potential to reduce the amount of energy used in data centres and large computing systems. Hugo Saleh, Ayar Labs’ senior vice-
president of commercial operations, said: “Whether you’re talking about HPC, or disaggregated computing, there is a real limiter on I/O. In HPC, it’s usually referred to as a memory bottleneck. It’s not a memory capacity issue. It’s the ability to move the data from memory DIMMs into the CPU and back. The other bottleneck that’s been seen and talked about quite a bit is the bottleneck on the GPU. Between the CPU and GPU transferring the data and then again, between the GPU itself and the memory.” “What we do at Ayar Labs is an attempt
to change the physical domain that data is transmitted,” said Saleh. “Going from electricity, voltages and
currents, to photons. And we do that coming straight out of the socket. So it’s not a transceiver at the back of the server, it’s not a mid-board optics. We design chiplets that sit inside the package, nearly abutted to the CPU, memory, GPU or accelerator. We’re agnostic to the host ASIC. Then we transmit photons and light outside of the package for your high- speed, low-power I/O.” Ayar Labs first demonstrated this
technology at Supercomputing 2019, the US conference and exhibition held annually in the US. “We have a full test rig. We first demonstrated our technology to the HPC community at Supercomputing
‘This technology could massively increase the memory bandwidth for future HPC and AI systems’
2019 in Denver. Since then, we’ve made two public announcements about the projects we’re doing with Intel. So Intel has themselves demonstrated an FPGA with our photonics inside of it, transmitting massive amounts of data at much lower power,” said Saleh. This technology could massively
increase the memory bandwidth for future HPC and AI systems. Each chiplet delivers the equivalent of 64 PCIe Gen 5 lanes, which provides up to two terabits per second of I/O performance. The system uses standard silicon fabrication techniques and disaggregated multi- wavelength lasers to achieve high-speed,
28 Scientific Computing World Summer 2023 The team at Quantum Source, which has benefitted from $12m from Dell Technologies Capital
high-density chip-to-chip communication with power consumption at a picojoule range. Ayar Labs developed its technology alongside GlobalFoundries as part of its monolithic silicon photonics platform. “We worked with the GlobalFoundries on
developing a monolithic process, one that lets you put electronics and optics on the same chip,” Saleh said. “A lot of traditional optics are separate; we have it all combined into one, and that simplifies our customer’s life when they’re packaging all these components – it reduces power, costs, and latency.” GF Fotonix is Global Foundries’ next-
generation, monolithic platform, which is the first in the industry to combine its 300mm photonics features and 300GHz- class RF-CMOS on a silicon wafer. The process has been designed to deliver performance at scale and will be used to develop photonic compute and sensing applications. Ayar Labs also helped GF develop an advanced electro-optic PDK that will be released in Q2 2022 and will be integrated into electronic design automation (EDA) vendor design tools.
Dell backs start-up In April, an Israeli photonic quantum computing start-up announced it has extended its seed funding round to $27m – thanks to an injection of cash from Dell Technologies Capital (DTC). Quantum Source, which aims to develop commercially viable photonic quantum computers, will use the $12m top-up to expand its research and development team as it scales up. In this context, photonic quantum
computing uses photons as a representation of qubits. Quantum Source
uses a unique approach to generate photons and quantum gates up to five orders of magnitude more efficiently than state-of-the-art implementation. Oded Melamed, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Source, said: “We founded Quantum Source with the belief that photonic quantum technologies are the best route to achieve large-scale, fault- tolerant quantum computers. Our unique approach will dramatically improve the scalability of those machines and will be the key to commercial success of quantum computers. Having investors such as Dell Technologies Capital believe in us will allow us to accelerate our work and by extension, entire industries.” Founded in 2021 by a team of
semiconductor industry veterans and accomplished physicists, Quantum Source is developing technology to efficiently implement large scale, fault-tolerant, photonic quantum computers. To date, companies have built small quantum computers with just tens or hundreds of qubits. While these rudimentary quantum computers are truly groundbreaking technology, the systems are not yet commercially viable. Omri Green, partner at Dell Technologies Capital, said: “DTC invests in technologies that can move industries forward. We believe quantum computing has this potential and, as our first investment in this area, Quantum Source can be the team to get us there. Oded and this exceptional team of scientists and proven entrepreneurs are addressing crucial hurdles in photonic quantum – scalability and fault tolerance. Once those challenges are solved, the innovation upside will be boundless.” SCW
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