Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs eyes hyperscale customers with GUC design collab

Exclusive Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs announced a new collaboration with Global Unichip Corp (GUC) on Sunday to integrate its optical I/O chiplets into the Taiwanese semiconductor design services provider's XPU reference designs.

The idea is that rather than using copper interconnects, which have limited reach and often require the use of costly retimers, Ayar's TeraPHY photonic chiplets can be co-packaged alongside compute dies, enabling more than 200 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth for chip-to-chip communications.

If Ayar and GUC can deliver on this design point, that'd make XPUs based on the tech more than 10 times faster than the fastest interconnects today, which top out at 14.4 Tbps.

This kind of optical I/O could eventually allow compute domains to scale beyond one rack to many, or even across entire aisles or data halls, without compromising on power consumption.

"We want to be able to ...