Wave Photonics at the double as it shadows NVIDIA power play
The integrated photonics startup has acquired the intangible assets of Phoelex Ltd, a County Durham business in administration. The cherry picking included key IP on energy-efficient modulator designs, driving and control circuits, and equaliser circuit designs.
Wave Photonics will use this IP to serve customers in the optical interconnect market, which is expected to grow rapidly – driven by demand for highbandwidth, energy-efficient communication within data centres. Importantly, that’s a requirement for the training of the AI models required for agentic AI.
The swoop came days after NVIDIA announced its Spectrum-X Photonics, CoPackaged Optics Networking Switches, highlighting the importance of silicon photonics to address the continued exponential growth in demand for bandwidth required to train large models.
Phoelex developed cutting-edge chiplet-based technology, applicable to both pluggable optical transceivers and co-packaged optics solutions. A key element of these designs is an innovative low-power modulator that can be driven directly from a CMOS chip, as well as the required driving circuit IP, with photonic chips validated at multiple foundries.
The company also developed energy and space-efficient equaliser IP and ultraenergy-efficient, low-latency die-to-die interface IP with 0.1pJ/bit efficiency.
Aidong Xu, Wave Photonics’ Head of Business Development and former head of semiconductors at Cambridge Consultants – the DeepTech powerhouse of Capgemini – said: “The technology would be an enabler for a system chip development that heterogeneously integrates the key function blocks into a system-in-package architecture, combining both electronics and photonic devices to meet the performance, size and energy efficiency requirements.”
The news came hot on the heels of Wave forming a strategic partnership with Enlight Technology, a leading provider of EDA solutions from Taiwan, including Siemens EDA.
The collaboration will enable engineers across Taiwan and the wider Asian region to develop cutting-edge photonic integrated circuits. This enhances Wave’s partnership with Siemens EDA, which allows for Wave Photonics’ process development kits to be easily used directly with Siemens EDA’s Custom IC Design.
Wave Photonics CEO, James Lee, said: “Our partnership with Enlight Technology, will enable engineers to combine the use of leading EDA tools with Wave Photonics’ PIC design capability, as well as accessing our recently-acquired photonics and electronics IP for high-bandwidth datacoms to address the needs of the rapidly-growing silicon photonics industry.”
Wave uses a fabrication-aware computational model, to facilitate the rapid development of PIC designs. It empowers engineers to design chips for a wide range of wavelengths and many challenging applications including telecom/datacom, space-comm, sensing, quantum, optical computing, and diagnostic & healthcare sensing.
