Ayar Labs has named company co-founder and CTO Mark Wade its new CEO. He succeeds Charles Wuischpard, who will continue to serve in an advisory capacity over the coming weeks before he transitions out of the company in mid-January.
Wade is recognized as a photonics technology pioneer.
Before he founded Ayar Labs, Wade led the team that designed the optics in the world's first processor to communicate using light. Wade and his co-founders invented technology at MIT and UC Berkeley from 2010-2015, leading to the formation of Ayar Labs.
“There is a growing sense of momentum across the industry as it becomes increasingly clear that optical I/O enables large-scale AI compute and other data-intensive workloads to operate at bandwidths, energy efficiencies, and latencies that are unachievable through electrical-based interconnect technology,” Wade said. “I look forward to guiding our incredible team to capitalize on this opportunity, enabling our customers to realize the full potential of in-package optical I/O, and helping the company accelerate into our next growth phase.”
Investors take notice
Ayar Labs has continued to position itself to take part in the growing in-package optical I/O market.
Investors have continued to take notice. In 2022, Ayar Labs secured $130 million in additional funding. Led by Boardman Bay Capital Management, the funding was supported by strategic investments from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NVIDIA.
"With strategic investments from NVIDIA, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, Intel Capital and several others, Ayar Labs is deeply partnered with the commercial ecosystem and well positioned to scale to meet the high-volume opportunity we see with in-package optical I/O. 2023 has been an impressive year of progress for the company and I look forward to Mark and the team building on this in 2024 and beyond," said Will Graves, Chief Investment Officer at Boardman Bay Capital Management, which led Ayar Labs' Series C funding.
Focus on innovation
Ayar Labs has been driving several new photonics innovations. Earlier this year, the company showcased a 4 Tbps optical solution, moving data from one TeraPHY™ optical I/O chiplet to another at 2 Tbps in each direction powered by Ayar Labs’ SuperNova™ light source.
The company can achieve this data transfer at very low latency (5ns per chiplet + TOF) and using less than 5 pJ/bit (10W), a high level of energy efficiency that provides the power density and performance per watt needed for data-intensive workloads such as generative AI, machine learning, and more while also supporting novel disaggregated compute and memory architectures.
Ayar Labs has made ongoing strides with a growing customer base and new products over the past year. The company recently demonstrated its in-package optical I/O solution integrated with Intel’s Agilex® FPGA technology. This new optically enabled FPGA promises 5x the current industry bandwidth at 5x lower power and 20x lower latency, all packaged in a common PCIe card form factor.
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Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategies of Lightwave and Broadband Technology Report across their websites, email newsletters, events, and other information products.