PsiQuantum has raised about $665 million so far, although the promise of quantum computers changing the world is still years out. PsiQuantum/Handout via REUTERS Tīeyond connecting transistor chips, startups using silicon photonics for building quantum computers, supercomputers, and chips for self-driving vehicles are also raising significant funds. graphic chips market in 2020.Ī view of a PsiQuantum Wafer, a silicon wafer containing thousands of quantum devices, including single-photon detectors, manufactured via PsiQuantum’s partnership with GlobalFoundries in Palo Alto, California, U.S., in an undated photo taken in March 2021. PitchBook’s senior emerging technology analyst Brendan Burke expects silicon photonics to become standard 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 challenging as devices used for creating light or controlling it have not been as easy to shrink as transistors.

Using current electrical methods, there is a bottleneck in data transmission speed between chips or servers. The challenge is that many large machine-learning algorithms can use hundreds or thousands of chips for computing. “The data movement challenge and energy consumption in that data movement is a big issue.” is growing like crazy and taking over large data center parts,” Ayar Labs CEO Charles Wuischpard told Reuters. 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, silicon photonics startups raised over $750 million last year, doubling from 2020. Not only is it hard to make something so minuscule, but as they get smaller, signals can bleed between them. While the transistor-based silicon chip has increased computing power exponentially over the 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 it had raised $130 million from investors, including chip giant Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O).

Technology Chip startups using light instead of wires gaining speed and investments By Jane Lanhee Lee 29 April 2022 1 second of 15 secondsVolume 90% 01:49 01:49 April 26 (Reuters) - Computers using light rather than electric currents for processĬhip startups using light instead of wires gaining speed and investmentsĪpril 26 (Reuters) - 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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