Lockheed Martin and Ayar Labs have formed a strategic collaboration to develop future sensory platforms that leverage Ayar Labs' advanced optical I/O microchips that use light to transfer data faster, at a lower latency, and at a fraction of the power of existing electrical I/O solutions. The new platforms could be used across Department of Defense (DoD) applications to capture, digitize, transport, and process spectral information. "As the complexity and amount of data grows on the battlefield, faster decision-making is essential. New innovative system architectures, coupled with AI and machine learning techniques, are needed for our customers' mission success," said Steve Walker, chief technology officer and vice president, Engineering & Technology at Lockheed Martin. "Ayar Labs' optical interconnect solution provides the necessary technology to process spectral information with greater speed and lower latency for next-generation system designs."

The collaboration will focus on integrating Ayar Labs' technology to develop scale-out architectures enabled by high-bandwidth, low-latency and ultra-low-power optical-based interconnects for future Nvidia products. Together, the companies plan to accelerate the development and adoption of optical I/O technology to support the explosive growth of AI and machine learning (ML) applications and data volumes. Optical I/O uniquely changes the performance and power trajectories of system designs by enabling compute, memory and networking ASICs to communicate with dramatically increased bandwidth, at lower latency, over longer distances and at a fraction of the power of existing electrical I/O solutions, say the companies. The technology is also foundational to enabling emerging heterogeneous compute systems, disaggregated/pooled designs, and unified memory architectures that are critical to accelerating future data center innovation. "Today's state-of-the-art AI/ML training architectures are limited by current copper-based compute-to-compute interconnects to build scale-out systems for tomorrow's requirements," says Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs.