This week, Ayar Labs closed a $155M series D round, bringing the company’s total funding to around $370M. For those who do not know Ayar Labs, we have previously featured them on STH. They make a high-speed optical I/O interconnect designed to replace copper in the future.
Ayar Labs Closes a $155M Series D from AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and More
Ayar Labs makes a high-speed optical I/O interconnect. It is also one that has already been shown with Intel packaging. The basic idea is to replace copper traces with optical interconnects to extend the reach and the bandwidth of off-chip interconnects.
Part of the challenge with optical I/O is simply how it is packaged and presented outside the chip. Many of the current designs focus on a pluggable connector and a chiplet that can be integrated into larger packages.
Another key challenge is light sources. Ayar Labs has its own light source solution as well.
Last year at SC23, we showed off the TeraPHY running at around 4Tbps in a show floor demo.
Beyond demos, the big quesiton is now how does this go from showfloor demos and test chips to deployments. Scaling to high-volume manufacturing is a focus of the Series D round that just closed.
Final Words
Given just how much money is being spent on huge AI packages and the overall AI infrastructure buildout these days, having an optical I/O can be extremely helpful. This is the type of technology that can help bridge large packages in a server. PCB and copper are great and reliable, but at some point, optics make sense. While the new round values Ayar Labs at $1B, it is also notable that AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA participated. Notably absent from the company’s press releases are companies like Broadcom and Marvell that are doing a lot of the hyper-scale custom silicon work. Those two companies also have their own optics divisions and co-packaged optics solutions.
