AI chips with optical MAC and waveguide break memory-wall offering extreme HBM

In a breakthrough Silicon-photonics technology, Lightelligence has unveiled its new optical waveguide integrated chip called Hummingbird, claiming as world’s first Optical Network-on-Chip (Onoc) processor designed for domain-specific artificial intelligence (AI) workloads for today's Hyperscale servers. Lightelligence, a company founded by X-MITs makes light signal processing a reality with Optical Multiply Accumulate (O-MAC) digital signal processor and optical waveguide based on-chip communication. Hummingbird uses multiple stacked dies of optical waveguide fabricated photonic-chip and electronic-chip to increase data interface bandwidth between memory and processors and across processor elements, basicall clearing the bottleneck of memory and processor interface speed limits, what is now called as memory-wall enabling extreme HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). Lightelligence to demo its Hummingbird at Hot Chips August 27-29 at Stanford University. “Photonics is the solution to the critical compute scaling problem, which has become pressing as the traditional solutions struggle to keep up with the exponential growth of compute power demand spurred by breakthroughs in the AI industry,” remarks Yichen Shen, CEO of Lightelligence. “Hummingbird demonstrates how the industry can address the scaling problem by incorporating photonic technologies into their next-generation product...