Ayar Labs adds executives, U.S. East Coast presence as focus moves to CPO production

Co-packaged optics (CPO) company Ayar Labs has added a pair of executives and an office in Cambridge, MA, as it moves towards product production. The new hires include Lakshmikant (LK) Bhupathi as vice president of products, strategy, and Ecosystem, and Scott Clark as vice president of manufacturing and operations.

Ayar Labs offers optical I/O technology based on its proprietary TeraPHY chiplets and SuperNova multiwavelength external lasers (see “Ayar Labs partners with GLOBALFOUNDRIES for optical I/O demo, expanded sampling for co-packaged optics”). The company has announced that it will supply technology to HPE for the company’s HPE Slingshot Ethernet fabric as well as a partnership with NVIDIA to pair optical I/O with artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructures for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications (see “HPE, Ayar Labs pair to bring optical I/O to HPE Slingshot Ethernet fabric” and “Ayar Labs, NVIDIA team to apply optical I/O to artificial intelligence/HPC architectures”).

The company thus is ready to begin churning out chiplets. “As Ayar Labs moves aggressively into the production of our core optical I/O technology, we’re turning our attention to scaling commercial efforts and expanding our product line both horizontally and vertically,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. “LK and Scott play a critical role in helping position us for the next exciting phase of growth as we lead not just the technical development but also the production of optical I/O.”

Bhupathi joins Ayar Labs from Marvell Semiconductor (NASDAQ: MRVL), where his roles in design, technical marketing, and product included a tenure as vice president, product management/marketing at Aquantia, which Marvell acquired in 2019; the acquisition subsequently led him to overseeing CXL and Ethernet NIC product strategy and roadmap for Marvell’s cloud and enterprise data center applications. Bhupathi also served as the president and marketing chair for the NBASE-T alliance, which is now part of the Ethernet Alliance.

Clark was most recently vice president of supply chain at Corsair Gaming (NASDAQ: CRSR). However, he has extensive experience in optical communications and other photonic technologies development gained through work at Allied Telesis in Japan, Stratalight Communications (acquired by OpNext), Arecont Vision, AOptix Technologies, and Tascent, a spinoff of AOptix.

Meanwhile, the new office at 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Ste. 401, Cambridge, MA, represents something of a homecoming for Ayar Labs, as the company’s co-founders met at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before starting the company in 2015. At the same time, Ayar Labs also has opened a new West Coast facility at 695 River Oaks Parkway in San Jose, which the company says is larger than its existing location in Santa Clara. Once fully moved in next year, Ayar Labs will use the San Jose site to host test, measurement, validation, and qualification efforts.

DoD partnership

Separately, Ayar Labs also revealed that it has received a $15 million multi-year prototype Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) from the Department of Defense as part of Project KANAGAWA (the Co-Packaged Analog-Drive High-Bandwidth Optical Input/Output Project). The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division issued the award to support the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Research & Engineering Trusted & Assured Microelectronics program.

The OTA covers two activities. The first will see Ayar Labs deliver its optical I/O chiplets and lasers in support of data rates exceeding 2 Tbps and energy losses below 5 pJ/bit. The second task, which will run in parallel with the first, calls for Ayar Labs to collaborate with Intel, Lockheed Martin, and Qorvo to develop and demonstrate co-packaged optical I/O “solutions” with the goal of advancing the supply chain ecosystem for domestic manufacturing of Ayar Labs’ optical I/O approach.

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