PACE
PACE (Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine) is Lightelligence’s first fully integrated optical computing platform.
Announced in 2021, PACE leverages the inherent properties of light to generate optimal solutions to the Ising, Max-Cut, and Min-Cut problems over 800 times faster than current high-end GPUs while maintaining high throughput, low latency, and energy efficiency.
These problems belong to an important class of intractable mathematical problems known as NP-complete, which have stumped mathematicians for the last 50 years. Algorithms for NP-complete problems are important because they can be mapped to each other, and they have hundreds of practical applications in fields that include cryptography, power grid optimization and advanced image analysis.
The core of PACE is a 64×64 optical matrix multiplier in an integrated silicon photonic chip and a CMOS microelectronic chip, flip-chip packaged together. In addition to its advances in 3D packaging, PACE’s photonic chip contains over 12,000 discrete photonic devices and has a system clock of 1GHz.
Comet
In 2019, Lightelligence announced the world’s first optical AI accelerator prototype—Comet. This demo ran MNIST, a benchmark machine learning model that uses computer vision to recognize handwritten digits and showed that Matrix-Vector multiplication, a key component of machine learning, can be completed by Lightelligence’s optical chip 100 times faster than the state-of-the-art electronic chips.
