Photonic computing company Lightmatter has joined the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium.
In a statement, the company said that as a contributing member, it would offer up its Passage interconnect to help the consortium achieve its aim of standardizing advanced interconnect solutions for large numbers of AI accelerators.
Founded in May 2024, the UALink Consortium wants to define and establish an open industry standard that will enable AI accelerators to communicate more effectively and efficiently. Billing itself as an alternative to Nvidia’s NVLink offering, consortium members include AMD, Intel, Meta, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Astera Labs, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft, as well as Lightmatter.
Boston-based Lightmatter specializes in photonics-enabled technologies that use light instead of electrical signals for computing, meaning its chips don’t experience the same heat or resistance as traditional chip architectures. Its Passage interconnect takes arrays of traditional processors and links them up using a programmable on-chip optical network.
“The UALink Consortium goals align perfectly with Lightmatter’s mission to push the boundaries of AI interconnect,” said Steve Klinger, VP, product, Lightmatter. “We look forward to working with consortium partners to redefine the scalability and efficiency of next generation compute clusters. These advancements will be transformative for AI infrastructure.”
In December 2024, Synopsys unveiled a UALink IP solution that will offer up to 200 Gbps throughput per lane, linking up to 1,024 accelerators. The UALink 1.0 specification will be publicly available in Q1 2025 with Synopsys’ solution scheduled to be available in the second half of 2025.