Lightmatter, a company founded by MIT alumni, is pioneering the use of light for data processing and transfer to address the limitations of traditional computing methods. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com
Lightmatter, founded by three
Now Lightmatter, a company founded by three MIT alumni, is continuing the remarkable progress of computing by rethinking the lifeblood of the chip. Instead of relying solely on electricity, the company also uses light for data processing and transport. The company’s first two products, a chip specializing in artificial intelligence operations and an interconnect that facilitates data transfer between chips, use both photons and electrons to drive more efficient operations.
Pioneering Light-Based Computing
“The two problems we are solving are ‘How do chips talk?’ and ‘How do you do these [AI] calculations?’” Lightmatter co-founder and CEO Nicholas Harris PhD ’17 says. “With our first two products, Envise and Passage, we’re addressing both of those questions.”
In a nod to the size of the problem and the demand for AI, Lightmatter raised just north of $300 million in 2023 at a valuation of $1.2 billion. Now the company is demonstrating its technology with some of the largest technology companies in the world in hopes of reducing the massive energy demand of data centers and AI models.
“We’re going to enable platforms on top of our interconnect technology that are made up of hundreds of thousands of next-generation compute units,” Harris says. “That simply wouldn’t be possible without the technology that we’re building.”
Lightmatter’s Passage chip interconnect takes advantage of light’s latency and bandwidth advantages to link processors in a manner similar to how fiber optic cables use light to send data over long distances. Sending information between chips is central to running the massive server farms that power cloud computing and run AI systems like ChatGPT. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers. Edited by MIT News
From Idea to $100K
Prior to MIT, Harris worked at the semiconductor company Micron Technology, where he studied the fundamental devices behind integrated chips. The experience made him see how the traditional approach for improving computer performance — cramming more transistors onto each chip — was hitting its limits.
“I saw how the roadmap for computing was slowing, and I wanted to figure out how I could continue it,” Harris says. “What approaches can augment computers? Quantum computing and photonics were two of those pathways.”
Harris came to MIT to work on photonic SciTechDaily