![]() The aim is to remove major bottlenecks that conventional processors struggle with by using the science of photonics. Luminous approach is based on using light to transfer dense amount data efficiently and at a faster pace. The round has also attracted other investors including Travis Kalanick’s fund 10100, BoxGroup, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and Emil Michael as well as pre-seed investors Class 5 Global, Joshua Browder, Ozmen Ventures, Schox Investments and Third Kind Venture Capital. In a seed round led by Bill Gates, Neo’s Ali Partovi and Luke Nosek and Steve Oskoui of Gigafund, Luminous raised $9 million worth of funds. Goa is also the founder of AlphaSheets, a software startup. Gomez started a software-as-a-service business in arena of fashion industry and recently worked at Tinder as a data scientist. Luminous was founded by Michael Gao, the company’s chief strategist, CEO Marcus Gomez and CTO Mitchell Nahmias, whose research at Princeton is the foundation for the chip. Now, while that proposal may sound like a moonshot, the one-year old startup has been already attracting a number of high-profile investors willing to bet on the prospect. “But it’s going to be a while before we have pure digital photonic compute for non-quantum systems.Luminous Computing is proposing to build up a photonics chip that will deal with workloads required by AI at the speed of the light. “What the Ayar Labs guys do so well … is they solved the data interconnect problem for traditional high-performance (computing),” he said. Peter Barrett, founder of venture capital firm Playground Global, an investor in Ayar Labs and PsiQuantum, believes in the long-term prospects for silicon photonics for speeding up computing, but says it is a long road ahead. GlobalFoundries Head of Computing and Wired Infrastructure Amir Faintuch said collaboration with PsiQuantum, Ayar, and Lightmatter has helped build up a silicon photonics manufacturing platform for others to use. Semiconductor manufacturers are also gearing up to use their silicon chip-making technology for photonics. It is not just the startups pushing this technology forward. ![]() ![]() Luminous Computing, a startup building an AI supercomputer using silicon photonics backed by Bill Gates, raised a total of $115 million. Lightmatter, which builds processors using light to speed up AI workloads in the datacenter, raised a total of $113 million and will release its chips later this year and test with customers soon after. PsiQuantum raised about $665 million so far, although the promise of quantum computers changing the world is still years out. graphic chips market in 2020.īeyond connecting transistor chips, startups using silicon photonics for building quantum computers, supercomputers, and chips for self-driving vehicles are also raising big funds. PitchBook’s senior emerging technology analyst Brendan Burke expects silicon photonics to become common hardware in data centers by 2025 and estimates the market will reach $3 billion by then, similar to the market size of the A.I. ![]() Light has been used to transmit data through fiber-optic cables, including undersea cables, for decades, but bringing it to the chip level was hard as devices used for creating light or controlling it have not been as easy to shrink as transistors. The challenge is that many large machine-learning algorithms can use hundreds or thousands of chips for computing, and there is a bottleneck on the speed of data transmission between chips or servers using current electrical methods. “The data movement challenge and the energy consumption in that data movement is a big, big issue.” is growing like crazy and taking over large parts of the data center,” Ayar Labs CEO Charles Wuischpard told Reuters in an interview. So, Moore’s law, which said every two years the density of the transistors on a chip would double and bring down costs, is slowing, pushing the industry to seek new solutions to handle increasingly heavy artificial intelligence computing needs.Īccording to data firm PitchBook, last year silicon photonics startups raised over $750 million, doubling from 2020. Not only is it hard to make something so miniscule, but as they get smaller, signals can bleed between them. While the transistor-based silicon chip has increased computing power exponentially over past decades as transistors have reached the width of several atoms, shrinking them further is challenging. In the latest example, Ayar Labs, a startup developing this technology called silicon photonics, said on Tuesday it had raised $130 million from investors including chip giant Nvidia Corp. – Computers using light rather than electric currents for processing, only years ago seen as research projects, are gaining traction and startups that have solved the engineering challenge of using photons in chips are getting big funding.
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