This week we look at Xscape Photonics, an optical interconnect startup spun out of research at Columbia University

Xscape Photonics is an optical interconnect startup that is spinning out of research at Columbia University .

Xscape raised $44 million in its Series A venture round, following a $13 million seed round after its founding in 2022 .

The demand for optical intercomms is so high, given the immense bandwidth bottlenecks for accelerator-to-accelerator and accelerator to memory needs, that raising venture funding is not a problem.

Xscape Photonics wants to solve the problem of tapering bandwidth in AI accelerators.

The problem is that the bandwidth between compute elements or memory starts to taper off, and rather quickly.

Low utilization on very expensive devices is a problem for AI training and inference.

The Xscape team has a laser that can drive multiple wavelengths at the same time of a fiber like 128 colors.

The ChromX photonics platform is programmable, so the number of wavelengths provided matches the need of a particular AI training or inference workload.

With this architecture, the HBM memory is not attached to the GPUs, but is glued together in banks that would probably be implemented on physically distinct shelves in a rack or across entire racks.

The idea is to reduce the overall power consumption of the interconnects for accelerators and their memories by 10X.