Laser startup Vector Photonics says it will receive £1 million ($1.24 million) via the UK’s ZEUS industrial research project to help commercialize its 1-W, all-semiconductor Photonic Crystal Surface Emitting Lasers (PCSELs) for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The PCSEL will be able to provide up to 20 data channels per chip in support of AI silicon, the company asserts.
The work funded under Zeus will leverage Vector Photonics’ previous datacom PCSEL commercialization efforts as a foundation (see, for example, “Vector Photonics touts new investment, PCSEL performance”). The company asserts its PCSELs will generate significantly more optical power than standard DFBs, which operate at a maximum of 100 mW, Vector Photonics estimates.
The Zeus project is a collaborative fund split between Innovate UK at £700,000 ($871,000) and the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund at £300,000 ($373,000). “ZEUS is a 24-month project covering the design, simulation, manufacture, and test, of a 1-Watt, AI PCSEL,” explained Dr. Richard Taylor, CTO of Vector Photonics. “The full impact of a 1-Watt PCSEL on AI chip design is not yet quantified, as the entire architecture of the chips and systems will change, but it brings countless manufacturing and energy saving benefits. Power consumption, heat, and latency are reduced; the PCSEL’s symmetrical far-field requires less operational power for equivalent performance, so a further power reduction can be expected here; and the vastly reduced laser count per chip makes manufacture simpler and the chip smaller, which will undoubtedly improve yield and reliability.”
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