Ayar Labs demonstrated a 4 Tbps optical interconnect solution designed for AI and data center architectures.

Silicon photonics-based chip-to-chip optical connectivity firm Ayar Labs of Santa Clara, CA, USA announced a public demonstration of what it claims is the industry's first 4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) bidirectional wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical solution at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC 2023) in San Diego from 5–9 March. The firm is currently working with high-volume manufacturing and supply partners including GlobalFoundries, Lumentum, Macom, Sivers Photonics and others to deliver the optical interconnects needed for data-intensive applications. At the same conference, partner Quantifi Photonics launched a CW-WDM-compliant test platform that integrates Ayar's SuperNova light source.

In-package optical I/O uniquely changes the power and performance trajectories of system design by enabling compute, memory and network silicon to communicate with a fraction of the power and dramatically improved performance, latency and reach versus existing electrical I/O solutions. Delivered in a compact, co-packaged CMOS chiplet, optical I/O becomes foundational to next-generation artificial intelligence (AI), disaggregated data centers, dense 6G telecoms systems, phased-array sensory systems and more. At OFC, Ayar demonstrated its optical I/O solution moving data from one TeraPHY optical I/O chiplet to another at 2.048Tbps each direction powered by its SuperNova light source. The system uses eight fiber links with 64 highly accurate wavelengths operating at 32Gbps per wavelength for a total of 256Gbps per individual fiber, running error free at lower than 10 nanoseconds of latency and without requiring forward error correction (FEC). This delivers a total bandwidth of 2.048Tbps each direction, or 4.096Tbps bidirectional, while consuming less than 5 picojoules per bit (10W), providing the power density and performance per watt needed for AI models with trillions of parameters and advanced HPC designs.

Craig Thompson, VP of business development for Networking at NVIDIA, stated: "In-package optical I/O solutions have the potential to transform how semiconductor, AI, HPC and aerospace customers process their next-generation, data-intensive workloads. NVIDIA's accelerated computing platform is enabled by advanced technologies such as WDM optical interconnects to equip tomorrow's innovators with the extreme performance they need." CEO Charlie Wuischpard commented: "Ayar Labs continues to showcase our technology leadership with this live silicon demonstration, an industry-first milestone on the path to overcoming the impending power and performance wall of electrical design, and unleashing the power of next generation compute. As we bring together all the supply, manufacturing, test and compute pieces needed for high-volume deployment, we also show today that we continue to lead in pure technical achievement."

According to the report 'Co-packaged Optics for Datacenter', revenue generated by optical I/O for high-performance computing (HPC) is increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 74% from about $5 million in 2022 to $2.3 billion in 2033, according to Martin Vallo, senior analyst, Photonics, at Yole Intelligence (part of Yole Group). Vallo noted: "Projections of rapidly growing training dataset sizes underline that data will become the main bottleneck for scaling machine learning (ML) models, resulting in a potential slowdown in artificial intelligence (AI) progress. Using optical I/O in ML hardware can help overcome this bottleneck, and could be the main driver for the adoption of optical interconnects for next-gen HPC systems."