Ultra-high density photonic interconnect and circuit switching up to the wafer-level with Passage

Speaker: Nick Harris, Founder and CEO, Lightmatter

Title: Ultra-high density photonic interconnect and circuit switching up to the wafer-level with Passage

Abstract: Co-packaged optics (CPO) is increasingly viewed as the path forward for supercomputing and AI scale-out. However, optical fibers used in CPO solutions are large, low-density, high-cost, and expensive to route and manage. Scale-out with CPO is only part of a larger networking picture including packet switches (which are reaching physical density limits). Circuit switching with photonics is beginning to be used in large-scale machine learning applications and represents a path towards petabit per second switching. Lightmatter’s Passage technology combines CPO, circuit switching, high-density photonic waveguides, and advanced 3D packaging to enable next-generation products that break through the memory wall, latency bounds, and more.

Bio: Nick Harris is the CEO and co-founder of Lightmatter, where his team is leading the evolution of computing, reducing its impact on our planet, and enabling the next great leaps in human progress through silicon photonics. Prior to founding Lightmatter, Nick was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow and National Science Foundation Fellow at MIT, where he received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Nick has authored 67 academic articles and 13 patents, and his doctoral thesis was titled “Programmable nanophotonics for quantum information processing and artificial intelligence.” Nick was previously an R&D engineer working on DRAM and NAND circuits and device physics at Micron Technologies.