https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lightelligence-ai_sweeping-changes-for-leading-edge-chip-architectures-activity-7105246968490123265-WrEe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

“Maurice Steinman, vice president of engineering at Lightelligence, said his company has developed purpose-built photonics-based accelerators that are 100X faster than GPUs at significantly lower power. The company also has developed optical networks-on-chip, which are more about using silicon interposers as the medium for connecting #chiplets using photons rather than electrons.

'The challenge with a purely electrical solution is that with the attenuation over distance, it really becomes practical to only do communication between nearest neighbors,” said Steinman. “If there’s a result in the top left [of a chip] that needs to communicate with the bottom right, it needs to traverse many hops. That creates a problem for the software components that are responsible for allocating resources, because it needs to think several chess moves ahead to avoid congestion.'”

This Semiconductor Engineering special report by Ed Sperling describes the data movement challenges in a Network-on-Chip and how Lightelligence's oNOC technology provides a solution.