AvicenaTech Corp., which is developing optical chip-to-chip connectivity technology based on microLEDs and multicore fiber, says it has raised $25 million in Series A funding from Samsung Catalyst Fund, Cerberus Capital Management, Clear Ventures, and strategic investor Micron Ventures. The money will be used for product development.
The startup’s LightBundle I/O technology leverages Cavity-Reinforced Optical Micro-Emitters (CROMEs), based on GaN microLEDs as used in display applications (see “Avicena touts LED-based LightBundle optical interconnects for chip-to-chip communication” and "Avicena demos microLED optical chip-to-chip interconnect with Lumileds"). The CROMEs can generate 10 Tbps per square millimeter at a power efficiency of less than 0.5 pJ/bit, the company has asserted. The inter-chip optical signal is delivered via the multicore fiber. Avicena expects LightBundles to find use in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud computing, next generation cellular radio, remote sensing, and aerospace applications.
“We believe that Avicena technology can be transformational in unlocking compute-to-memory chip-to-chip high-speed interconnects. Such technology can be central to supporting future disaggregated architectures and distributed high-performance computing (HPC) systems,” said Marco Chisari, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics and head of the Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center.
“We are excited to participate in this round at Avicena,” added Amir Salek, senior managing director at Cerberus Capital Management and former head of silicon for Google Infrastructure and Cloud. “Avicena has a highly differentiated technology addressing one of the main challenges in modern computer architecture. The technology offered by Avicena meets the needs for scaling future HPC and cloud compute networks and covers applications in conventional data center and 5G cellular networking.”
“Avicena’s differentiated interconnect technology promises to enable next-generation high-performance processor and memory clusters,” said Gayathri Radhakrishnan, senior director at Micron Ventures. “Avicena represents a strategic investment opportunity for Micron Technology to support innovation in HPC architectures with our partners and customers.”
“We are excited about closing our Series A funding with a distinguished group of existing and new investors,” said Bardia Pezeshki, founder and CEO of Avicena. “We will use the new funds to scale our team and build initial products for our growing family of partners and customers.”
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