| | | Photonic computing startup Lightmatter unveils new tech aimed at AI chips
Apr. 01, 2025 7:50 AM ET
By: Chris Ciaccia, SA News Editor
Photonic computing startup Lightmatter, which is backed in part by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL), unveiled new technology late on Monday aimed at speeding up the connections between artificial intelligence accelerators.
One piece of technology is known as the M1000 interposer — manufactured by GlobalFoundries ( GFS). The interposer lets the AI chip sit on top of it and allows it to connect to nearby chips also on top of the interposer. The other technology unveiled on Monday is a chiplet, which can sit on top of the AI chip.
“Passage M1000 is a breakthrough achievement in photonics and semiconductor packaging for AI infrastructure,” said Nick Harris, founder and CEO of Lightmatter, in a statement. “We are delivering a cutting-edge photonics roadmap years ahead of industry projections. Shoreline is no longer a limitation for I/O. This is all made possible by our close co-engineering with leading foundry and assembly partners and our supply chain ecosystem.”
Lightmatter raised $400M in a Series D funding round in October 2024, valuing the photonic computing startup at $4.4B. The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup develops photonic tech used in datacenter networking chips.
The company notes that it has invented the world's first 3D-stacked photonics engine called Passage, which is capable of connecting thousands to millions of processors at the speed of light in extreme-scale data centers for the advanced AI and high performance computing, or HPC, workloads.
In July, Lightmatter appointed Simona Jankowski as its CFO. Jankowski had previously worked at Nvidia ( NVDA) and Goldman Sachs ( GS). |
|
