Tagged silicon photonics · show all articles
Taiwan's second foundry sits a few kilometers from TSMC's headquarters and competes for almost none of the same customers — a deliberate positioning that a 93% revenue jump in its core node suggests is working.
Individual accelerators keep getting faster. The copper connecting thousands of them together increasingly cannot keep up — which is why Nvidia is betting heavily on replacing that copper with light.
Nvidia and Marvell are both betting on optics to connect chips together. Lightmatter's bet goes one step further: using light for the connections inside a chip package as well.
In 2018, GlobalFoundries walked away from the race to the smallest transistor entirely. In 2026, that decision looks less like a retreat and more like a specific, working strategy.
Not the chip. Not the training cluster. Ayar Labs focuses on one narrow, unglamorous problem — getting light on and off a chip efficiently — and is betting that narrowness is exactly what makes the bet work.