Celestial AI’s photonic fabric technology is said to accelerate AI technology far better than before. It is an optimal interconnect technology platform for computing and memory. The collaboration of Celestial AI with other designers is bringing innovative technology to the market.
Celestial AI acquires a $20 million patent portfolio from Rockley Photonics. The patent includes the accession of silicon photonics intellectual property including worldwide issued and pending patents. This makes Celestial AI’s total IP portfolio globally to become more than 200 patents and will be one of the strongest in the field.
A 2023 account was filed last week and the details about the value and patent were disclosed then.
The patent portfolio accessed by Celestial AI has three main categories of technology, optoelectronic systems-in-package, electro-absorption modulators (EAMs), and optical switch technology. These technologies have a number of artificial intelligence (AI) data center infrastructure applications. Celestial AI is developing a photonic substrate and these technologies are beneficial for different AI data center infrastructure applications.
Celestial AI is a machine learning accelerator company and its major product is the Photonic Fabric. It uses light to move data within the chips instead of the traditional method of using electricity. The company was established in 2020 in Santa Clara, California, and in March 2024, it closed a $175 million funding round.
Photonic fabric technology is a groundbreaking invention that increases the potential of devices from the slowdown of Moore’s Law. It helps in memory sharing and pooling, delivering data, and also supports the current HBM3E and next-generation HBM4 bandwidth and latency requirements. Even though it faced bankruptcy at the beginning of 2023, it was saved by $35 million with funds from stakeholders.
Rockley Photonics develops photonic integrated circuits, sensors, and health monitoring technologies. The technology used is LED-based photoplethysmography (PPG) technology and short-wave infrared (SWIR) laser-based spectroscopy to track biomarkers. They were the pioneers of silicon photonics back in 2014 and launched a biosensing wristband in December 2023.
The founder and CEO of Celestial AI, Dave Lazovsky said that the addition of Rocky’s IP into their technology can further increase the growth of the company’s intellectual property portfolio and the strength of its position.
Lazovsky also added that these patents fit well into the company’s expanding Photonic Fabric patent portfolio which includes advanced packaging, thermally stable Silicon photonics, and system architectures for optical compute interconnect. He says that this acquisition is a reflection of Celestial AI’s commitment to protecting Photonic Fabric-based solutions that are being implemented in the customer’s AI data center infrastructure.
The major challenge faced by high-performance AI chips is they can be overheated and Celestial AI is trying to increase their performance with lesser thermal and power requirements. The difference from the previous technology is in the way these chips are designed rather than the manufacturing.
David Lazovsky said that the hybrid photonic-electronic platform allows the company to get the best out of the complementary strengths of electronics for high performance, high-precision computing, and photonics for high-speed, low-power, high-bandwidth data movement. He previously stated that the system is optimized for power and latency, and the energy is becoming the gate of more AI and data transmission consuming 55% to 70% of power consumption, and it is not the compute power.
The technology comprises photonic integrated circuits (PIC) and electro-absorption modulators (EAM) implanted into the substrate and diodes of the chip which can capture data. Photonic integrated circuits use particles of light, which are the protons, instead of electrons used in electronic integrated circuits. Electro-absorption modulators are semiconductor devices that can modulate the intensity of a laser beam through an electric voltage and are based on the Franz-Keldysh effect.
