Ayar Labs names co-founder & CTO Mark Wade as CEO

Ayar Labs names co-founder & CTO Mark Wade as CEO

Time Stamp: December 12, 2023 4:35 AM
Source Node: 3011370

News: Optoelectronics

12 December 2023

Silicon photonics-based chip-to-chip optical connectivity firm Ayar Labs of Santa Clara, CA, USA has appointed co-founder & chief technology officer Mark Wade to serve as its new chief executive officer. He succeeds Charles Wuischpard, who will continue to serve in an advisory capacity over the coming weeks before he transitions out of the company in mid-January. “My focus since I joined Ayar Labs was to put the company on the path to long-term growth,” says Wuischpard. “With the incredible progress we have made over the past two years in particular, this feels like the right inflection point to make this transition.”

“There is a growing sense of momentum across the industry as it becomes increasingly clear that optical I/O enables large-scale AI compute and other data-intensive workloads to operate at bandwidths, energy efficiencies and latencies that are unachievable through electrical-based interconnect technology,” Wade says. “I look forward to guiding our incredible team to capitalize on this opportunity, enabling our customers to realize the full potential of in-package optical I/O, and helping the company accelerate into our next growth phase,” he adds.

Mark Wade, now Ayar Labs’ CEO. Picture: Mark Wade, now Ayar Labs’ CEO.

“Mark’s deep understanding of Ayar Labs’ technology and its application is shaped by a breadth of industry and customer engagements that make him the ideal leader to carry the company forward to its next stage of growth,” believes Matt Hershenson, partner & co-founder of Playground Global. “I would like to thank Charlie for his tremendous leadership and contributions to the company over the past five years, and for his ongoing guidance to ensure a seamless leadership transition in the coming weeks,” he adds.

Wade is recognized as a pioneer in photonics technologies and, prior to founding Ayar Labs, led the team that designed the optics in the world’s first processor to communicate using light. He and his co-founders invented breakthrough technology at MIT and UC Berkeley from 2010-2015, which led to the formation of Ayar Labs.

“With strategic investments from NVIDIA, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, Intel Capital and several others, Ayar Labs is deeply partnered with the commercial ecosystem and well positioned to scale to meet the high-volume opportunity we see with in-package optical I/O,” comments Will Graves, chief investment officer at Boardman Bay Capital Management, which led Ayar Labs’ Series C funding. “2023 has been an impressive year of progress for the company and I look forward to Mark and the team building on this in 2024 and beyond,” he adds.

Earlier this year, Ayar Labs showcased the industry’s first 4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) optical solution, moving data from one TeraPHY optical I/O chiplet to another at 2Tbps in each direction powered by Ayar Labs’ SuperNova light source. The firm is able to achieve this data transfer at very low latency (5ns per chiplet + TOF) and using less than 5pJ/bit (10W), a high level of energy efficiency that provides the power density and performance per watt needed for data-intensive workloads such as generative AI, machine learning and more while also supporting novel disaggregated compute and memory architectures.

Ayar Labs recently demonstrated its in-package optical I/O solution integrated with Intel’s Agilex FPGA technology. This new optically enabled FPGA promises 5x the existing industry bandwidth at 5x lower power and 20x lower latency, all packaged in a common PCIe card form factor.

See related items:

Ayar Labs adds $25m in expansion of $130m Series C funding round

Tags: silicon photonics

Visit: www.ayarlabs.com

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