POET Technologies announced an agreement with Celestial AI to provide multi-laser integrated external light source (ELS) modules using its advanced packaging platform based on the POET Optical Interposer. The agreement includes a contract for continued platform development, along with a purchase order for initial quantities of the advanced modules.
Celestial AI is developing a Photonic Fabric platform that uses light for data movement both within chip and between chips.
The POET Optical Interposer allows the seamless integration of electronic and photonic devices into a single multi-chip module using advanced wafer-level semiconductor manufacturing techniques and packaging methods.
“The customized Optical Interposer platform that we have co-developed with POET is among the most advanced of its kind in high-speed computing,” said David Lazovsky, founder and CEO of Celestial AI. “POET’s Light Engines provide us with precision optical power sources in a highly integrated form factor that meet the requirements for our Orion AI accelerator products.” Celestial AI’s Orion AI accelerator products serve the AI chipset market that is projected by Omdia to exceed $70 billion in 2025.
“We are truly excited to take the next step with Celestial AI, one of the leading technology companies in this burgeoning field, to create a highly differentiated means to co-package electronics and photonics and help overcome the fundamental challenges of speed and power faced in high performance computing,” said Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman and CEO of POET Technologies. “The challenges in this application are precisely those that the POET Optical Interposer was designed to overcome. They are the same as those faced by datacom and telecom companies as they seek to co-package electronics and optics and to achieve data transmission speeds of 3.2 and 6.4 Tbs across a number of channels with multiple wavelengths, with lower energy consumption and higher stability. The multi-laser integrated external light source developed for this application has direct applicability to other products in data communications and sensing.”
Celestial AI, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, raised $56 million in Series A funding for its proprietary hardware and software platform for machine learning chipsets.
Celestial AI’s proprietary Photonic Fabric technology platform aims to to fundamentally transform multi-chip processing systems. The Photonic Fabric enables optically addressable memory and compute (within chip and chip-to-chip). The company says uts proprietary architecture enables elegant, low-complexity system software, allowing highly efficient mapping of data and compute without the need for complex optimizations. This software advantage extends to multi-chip exascale systems as the Photonic Fabric democratizes optical access to effectively limitless memory and compute.
The funding round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) with participation from Temasek’s Xora Innovation fund, The Engine, the venture firm spun out of MIT, Tyche Partners, Merck’s corporate venture fund, M-Ventures, IMEC XPand, and venture capital investor in the Princeton University ecosystem, Fitz Gate.
The new capital will be used for expanding the global engineering team, product development and strategic supplier engagements, including Broadcom, to build the company’s Orion AI accelerator products.
“We are addressing the problem of our time in computing – efficient data movement,” said Celestial AI founder and CEO David Lazovsky. “Celestial AI’s hybrid photonic-electronic platform allows us to leverage the complementary strengths of electronics for high-performance, high-precision computing and photonics for high-speed, low-power, high-bandwidth data movement. The result is transformational performance advantages relative to electronic-only systems. The ML application benefits extend beyond performance and low power to latency, user friendly software, and low total cost of ownership. Our competitive differentiation will increase with time, as AI model complexity increases, driving increased data movement.”
Wednesday, October 06, 2021 POET POET Technologies has secured a commitment from a leading network systems company for a unique multi-engine design for 100G CWDM4 and 100G LR4 Optical Engines based on the POET Optical Interposer. The combined value of the NRE and the purchase order for initial units exceeds US$1.2 million.
The POET Optical Interposer enables the integration of electronic and photonic devices into a single multi-chip module using advanced wafer-level semiconductor manufacturing techniques and packaging methods. The company says its platform eliminates costly components and labor-intensive assembly, alignment, burn-in and testing methods employed in conventional photonics.
“We have been engaged with this customer for several months on a breakthrough design to incorporate multiple optical engines in a single industry standard transceiver module, something that only a POET Optical Interposer-based engine can enable,” noted Vivek Rajgarhia, President & General Manager of POET Technologies Inc. “The LR4 product is directed at the client side of major telecom networks, using rigorous standards for data communication between a transport network backbone to data centers and customer locations globally. Our customer is already selling into the well-established telecom equipment market, and with the POET Optical Engines, will be able to offer a solution to its customers that delivers superior performance at a price that cannot be matched today by competing solutions."
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