- Ayar Labs announced it has received a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures. These are the details.
Ayar Labs announced it has received a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures. This round of funding will be used to accelerate the commercialization of Ayar Labs’ patented monolithic in-package optical I/O (MIPO) solution for applications that require high bandwidth, low latency, and power-efficient short-reach interconnects.
The focused application areas are in artificial intelligence (AI) where compute to compute I/O bandwidth is a critical requirement along with High-Performance Computing (HPC) to enable dramatically new system architectures that can maintain Moore’s Law price/performance scaling and Digital Beamforming radar applications for enabling interconnect bandwidths to handle massive increases in Radio Frequency (RF) inputs.
Ayar Labs had publicly demonstrated its monolithic electronic photonic TeraPHY chiplet at the Supercomputing 2019 conference. Now the company is working with select semiconductor manufacturers, OEM systems builders, and end-users on sampling and co-design partnerships in 2020.
Ayar Labs is known for disrupting the traditional performance, cost, and efficiency curves of the semiconductor and computing industries by driving a 1000x improvement in interconnect bandwidth density at 10x lower power. And Ayar Labs’ patented approach uses industry-standard cost-effective silicon processing techniques to develop high speed, high density, low power optical-based interconnect “chiplets,” and lasers to replace traditional electrical-based I/O.
Key Quotes:
“We are excited to welcome Lockheed Martin Ventures as a strategic investor. Working with key system integrators like Lockheed Martin, who really understand the value of our solution and how to design it into future complex systems, is incredibly important. In that sense, we view this relationship as more than funding alone, but as an important long-term working relationship as well.”
– Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs
“Our charter is to strategically invest in smaller technology companies focused on innovative technologies within Lockheed Martin’s existing businesses, and Ayar Labs fits this criteria. We are very excited to add Ayar Labs to our investment portfolio and look forward to working with them and gaining access to their in-package optical interconnect that could provide business and technical value across our business units.”
– Chris Moran, executive director and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures
