Baidu investment Lightelligence to develop optical AI chip

Lightelligence, a startup in Boston, USA, recently won $ 10 million in seed round financing with a consortium of investors from Baidu Ventures and US semiconductor industry executives. Lightelligence hopes to accelerate with a new photonic circuit technology Information processing, a technique that uses photons rather than electrons to calculate, uses light to transmit signals, similar to fibers, but more efficient than electronic circuits, with lower latency and higher throughput.

The technology was originally developed by MIT scientists, and Lightelligence was the company that split the study.

Now the company's idea is to use photonics to speed artificial intelligence calculations, and several researchers at the company confirmed the role of photonic circuits in a study published last year in the journal Nature - Photonics, Subsequent series of papers also examined photonic circuits and neural network algorithms, and Shen Yichen, one of the authors of last year's paper, is currently co-founder and CEO of Lightelligence.

Lightelligence believes that photonic circuits provide superior performance in many areas, such as training and reasoning for accelerating depth learning as a coprocessor in the cloud. Photonic circuits can also be used in network edge devices to serve drones, IoT sensors that require efficient, low-power systems.

Lightelligence also said that there is now a separate optical chip, and calculated in the first quarter of 2019 to develop prototype products, and in the next 2-3 years to develop a mass production of products.

Source: Lei Feng network