Lightelligence intros CXL card with optical interconnect

Lightelligence, a start-up based in Boston with offices in Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Nanjing, introduced optical communications hardware designed for PCIe and Compute Express Link (CXL) connectivity.

Photowave, which is is being demonstrated at this week’s Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California,  enables CXL 2.0/PCIe Gen 5 connectivity over optics with support for x16, x8, x4 and x2 bifurcation modes of operation, allowing for a wide variety of deployment scenarios. In addition to high-speed electrical-to-optical conversion for the data signals, Photowave also supports sideband signals over optics making it possible to implement more efficient and reliable disaggregation architectures.

This follows Lightelligence’s introduction of Hummingbird, an Optical Network-on-Chip (oNOC) processor for domain-specific artificial intelligence (AI) workloads in June, and PACE, the world’s first integrated photonic computing system for Optical Multiply Accumulate (oMAC) in late 2021.

“We are more than excited to unveil the next piece of our product portfolio,” comments Yichen Shen, CEO of Lightelligence. “Photowave will soon set the standard for workload efficiency. It makes it possible to build scalable computing and accelerator pods with just the right amount of resources.”

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