Lightelligence: The leader in developing photonic solutions that provides exponential increases in computing speed

A leading innovator in optical computing, Lightelligence conceives and develops technology that pushes the boundaries of what's possible. By emphasizing practical solutions and adopting a cooperative, worldwide viewpoint, they are converting innovative ideas into game-changing discoveries.

Lightelligence's elite technological R&D and engineering teams were assembled when the company was launched in 2017. Lightelligence has revolutionized photonics technology by working closely with industry leaders in semiconductors, cloud computing, finance, and autonomous driving. These innovative computing solutions not only result in exponential increases in processing power but also significantly lower energy consumption. 

The mission of Lightelligence is to unleash the potential of optical computing and turn innovative ideas into practical solutions. They hold a firm belief in being honest, determined, brave, modest, creative, and realistic.

Products that are on the frontlines of real-world applications

Lightelligence has a range of products including PACE, Hummingbird oNOC, Photowave and Moonstone. Two of their most popular products have been elaborated on below:

Hummingbird

Using cutting-edge vertically stacked packaging technologies, Hummingbird™, an optical network-on-chip processor for domain-specific artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, combines an electrical die and a photonic die into a single package. With Hummingbird's ground-breaking architecture, chip designers creating innovative system-in-packages with NoC interconnects have a way to go beyond the "memory wall.”

Hummingbird is the first product in a family of devices that use Lightelligence's oNOC platform; boosting computing capabilities by enabling creative interconnect topologies via silicon photonics. Hummingbird serves as the communications network for data centers and other high-performance applications. By using an all-to-all data broadcast network to each core on a 64-core domain-specific AI processor chip, Hummingbird's waveguides enable signals to travel at the speed of light. This results in considerable power and latency savings over conventional digital interconnect methods. Hummingbird's oNOC technology, in contrast to digital networks, allows for interconnecting topologies that would not be feasible otherwise, increasing density scaling. Because of the increased efficiency of communication, it permits a higher usage of computer power. Workload mapping to hardware is made simpler and gives more flexibility in choosing the best topology for the computing activity when using oNOC. A 64-core low-latency optical all-to-all broadcast network is used in the implementation of Hummingbird. It offers a framework to create various dense optical network topologies with 64 transmitters and 512 receivers.

For installation on industry-standard servers, Hummingbird's electronic and photonic integrated circuits are co-packaged and integrated into a PCIe form factor. Workloads related to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) can be tailored to fully utilize the oNOC when combined with the Lightelligence Software Development Kit (SDK).

Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE)

The first fully integrated photonic computing platform from Lightelligence is called PACE (Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine). A 64x64 optical matrix multiplier packaged onto a CMOS microelectronic chip and an integrated silicon photonic chip is the central component of PACE. PACE's photonic chip features a system clock of 1 GHz, over 12,000 discrete photonic components, and sophisticated 3D packaging.

The input vector values for each optical matrix multiplication (MATMUL) are first taken out of the on-chip SRAM and then converted into analog values via the digital-analog converter. Subsequently, the microbubbles between the electronic and photonic chips are utilized to apply the values to their respective optical modulators, thus forming the input optical vector. The output optical vector is then produced by the input optical vector propagating through the optical matrix. After striking a number of photodetectors, the vector converts optical intensity into electrical current. After passing through the transimpedance amplifier, the analog-digital converter, and microbubbles on their way back to the electronic chip, the electrical signals finally enter the digital realm.

PACE is intended to address the lsing problem in two scenarios, where N consists of 63 or 64 spins. The adjacency matrix of the graph of the Ising model, the NxN-size matrix H, encodes the interaction between every two spins. The N-size binary vector S, also known as the state vector, describes the state of every spin.

The global leader in optical computing

Dr. Yichen Shen is the founder and CEO of Lightelligence.

“We're leading the way in developing photonic solutions that will deliver exponential increases in computing speed, and a positive impact on the industries that drive our everyday life.”