Nubis Communications, a start-up based in New Providence, New Jersey, emerged from stealth to unveil its an optical engine optimized for machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) networks.
Nubis’ underlying technology building block is a 16 x 112 Gbps (full duplex) Silicon Photonics engine with integrated modulator drivers and transimpedance amplifiers. This 2D-tileable optical engine supports over 500 Gbps per millimeter of full-duplex edge I/O density, pitch-matched to the bandwidth density of modern SerDes.
Nubis said its patented fiber array technology enables a density improvement of 10x from today’s front-panel pluggable transceivers without the need to bundle multiple optical streams onto the same fiber, maintaining the full parallelism needed for all-to-all mesh connectivity between ML/AI servers. With a power consumption under 4 pJ per bit, Nubis’ platform provides a 4x power savings over today’s technology. The ultra-low power and ultra-high density are critical to the continued growth of ML/AI clusters in power-constrained data centers where AI models are growing at a rate of 35x every 2 years.
Nubis is sampling its first product. The XT1600 has a total capacity of 1.6 Tbps optical transmit and 1.6 Tbps optical receive carried over 16 fiber pairs, allowing full fan-out and flexible assignment as sixteen independent 100-Gbps full-duplex channels, four separate 400 Gbps full-duplex channels, or two 800 Gbps full-duplex channels. The XT1600™ engine is optimized for unretimed direct-drive operation, connecting directly with host ASIC SerDes designed for copper links. This direct-drive approach dramatically lowers the power, size, and cost of the optical solution. Nubis plans to announce later this year additional products utilizing its technology across different use cases, including retimed pluggable modules, active optical cables and co-packaged optics modules.
The company, which was founded in 2020 by industry luminary Peter Winzer and a cross-functional team of industry experts, has raised over $40 million from Matrix Partners and other leading investors to fully fund the development of their first product to volume production.
“Our customers have consistently told us that the power and size of conventional optics are unsustainable,” said Dan Harding, CEO of Nubis Communications. “They are building the largest and highest performing data interconnect clusters in the world and are depending on us to deliver optics that are orders of magnitude denser, lower power, and more efficient to enable their network build-outs.”
