PitchBook’s senior emerging technology analyst Brendan Burke expects silicon photonics to become common hardware in data centers by 2025 and estimates the market will reach $3 billion by then, similar to the market size of the A.I. Light has been used to transmit data through fiber-optic cables, including undersea cables, for decades, but bringing it to the chip level was hard as devices used for creating light or controlling it have not been as easy to shrink as transistors. The challenge is that many large machine-learning algorithms can use hundreds or thousands of chips for computing, and there is a bottleneck on the speed of data transmission between chips or servers using current electrical methods. “The data movement challenge and the energy consumption in that data movement is a big, big issue.” is growing like crazy and taking over large parts of the data center,” Ayar Labs CEO Charles Wuischpard told Reuters in an interview. So, Moore’s law, which said every two years the density of the transistors on a chip would double and bring down costs, is slowing, pushing the industry to seek new solutions to handle increasingly heavy artificial intelligence computing needs.Īccording to data firm PitchBook, last year silicon photonics startups raised over $750 million, doubling from 2020. Not only is it hard to make something so miniscule, but as they get smaller, signals can bleed between them. While the transistor-based silicon chip has increased computing power exponentially over past decades as transistors have reached the width of several atoms, shrinking them further is challenging. In the latest example, Ayar Labs, a startup developing this technology called silicon photonics, said on Tuesday it had raised $130 million from investors including chip giant Nvidia Corp. – Computers using light rather than electric currents for processing, only years ago seen as research projects, are gaining traction and startups that have solved the engineering challenge of using photons in chips are getting big funding.
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