According to ChainCatcher news, optical interconnect chip company Volantis announced the completion of $88 million in Series A financing on X. The company stated that it is using optical solutions to solve the AI memory bottleneck, configuring a large amount of high-speed memory for the chip, and increasing the memory bandwidth and capacity of a single chip by several orders of magnitude to support high-speed inference of more than 10 trillion parameter models, with a single user speed of up to 10,000 tokens per second.
Volantis said that the solution will initially be used to accelerate intelligent agents, shortening programming tasks from hours to minutes or seconds. The company also says optical solutions can improve memory systems by orders of magnitude on a generational basis, rather than about 2x per year. His team has been involved in the first CoWoS products, early HBM, the first silicon photonic CPO system, the first large-scale mass production of tunable VCSELs, and the first processors that communicate directly with light. Currently, it has achieved a transmission distance of 10 times more than equivalent tiny electrical wires in the chip package. The next generation of products has been taped out, with the goal of reaching a bandwidth density record at the relevant distance.