Akhetonics
Assembly Line
Akhetonics gets fresh funding for a contrarian bet on all-optical chips
Photonics — a field that underpins light-based systems for manipulating data — has a bright future, as the rise of AI demands better computing performance, but it has yet to be fully applied to a new generation of chips. German startup Akhetonics hopes to change that. It has raised a €6 million seed funding round (approximately $6.33 million) to deliver on this promise, TechCrunch can exclusively reveal.
While several companies are working with photons on tangential issues or point solutions that mix electronics and photonics, Akhetonics — whose name is a portmanteau of Akhet, an Egyptian hieroglyph for “horizon,” and photonics — is outright aiming to build a general-purpose chip.
This will still take time, but maybe not as much as some may think; Akhetonics plans to deliver its first commercial product to customers mid-next year. Kissner is confident that it’s already confirmed feasibility thanks to its previous funding round by deep tech VC firm Runa Capital in 2023. “Our big goal was to show that you can do general purpose computing using only optics, and that is something that we have now shown,” he said.
An All-Optical General-Purpose CPU and Optical Computer Architecture
Energy efficiency of electronic digital processors is primarily limited by the energy consumption of electronic communication and interconnects. The industry is almost unanimously pushing towards replacing both long-haul, as well as local chip interconnects, using optics to drastically increase efficiency. In this paper, we explore what comes after the successful migration to optical interconnects, as with this inefficiency solved, the main source of energy consumption will be electronic digital computing, memory and electro-optical conversion. Our approach attempts to address all these issues by introducing efficient all-optical digital computing and memory, which in turn eliminates the need for electro-optical conversions. Here, we demonstrate for the first time a scheme to enable general-purpose digital data processing in an integrated form and present our photonic integrated circuit (PIC) implementation. For this demonstration we implemented a URISC architecture capable of running any classical piece of software all-optically and present a comprehensive architectural framework for all-optical computing to go beyond.