By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 1 (Reuters) – San Francisco-based semiconductor startup Volantis on Thursday said it has raised $88 million in venture capital in an effort to solve a key challenge for AI chips by tapping a technology that is already sitting in hundreds of millions of iPhones.
The fundamental limit for AI chips from both Nvidia and rivals like Advanced Micro Devices is how well the computing parts of a chip can talk to the memory chips where an AI model lives and feeds data to the computing chip. Nvidia and AMD solve the problem by encircling their computing chips with expensive high-bandwidth memory chips.
But even Nvidia’s best current offerings can hold only eight of those memory chips for each of its graphics processing units (GPUs) because of the limited reach of the tiny electrical wires that connect the memory chips. Volantis says it is developing a way to send data between computing chips and memory chips using beams of laser light, which eliminates the reach problem and would let it pack 220 memory chips around a GPU.
To do that, Volantis is tapping what are called vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, or VCSELs. While the tiny lasers sound exotic, they power the facial recognition features in many devices from Apple, which invested heavily in bolstering the supply chain over the past decade.
By bringing together relatively well-known components, Volantis is hoping to avoid some of the supply chain bottlenecks in developing AI chips and deliver a chip next year that would speed up tasks like AI coding, said Tapa Ghosh, CEO and co-founder of Volantis, in an interview.
“Advanced packaging is always to be respected – it’s never trivial – but it’s not necessarily a new thing to do,” Ghosh said. “No one is going to win a Nobel Prize if our project works, but the good news is, they won’t need to.”
The funding round was led by Stripe veteran Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures. John Doerr, who backed Google and Amazon.com in their early days, also participated, as did VXI Capital, Triatomic and Susa Ventures. The round also includes angel investments from AI podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, AI chip veteran Naveen Rao and Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)
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