Panmnesia raises $12.5m for CXL3.0 memory IP stack
Startup Panmnesia in Korea has raised $12.5m for CXL3.0 memory IP, chip and software development.
Panmnesia was born out of the collaborative efforts of a group of Ph.D. graduates from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) under Prof Myoungsoo Jung, who is now CEO. It aims to offer not only semiconductor IP for the CXL3.0 standard but data processing acceleration chips and CXL-aware software.
“CXL 3.0 takes a fundamentally different viewpoint from CXL 2.0 in its approach to various processors and memory semiconductor devices to support high scalability. Regrettably, most companies are still only discussing certain features of CXL 1.1 or 2.0,” said Myoungsoo Jung, CEO of Panmnesia.
The company is taping out silicon later this month.
Panmnesia showed the world’s first CXL 2.0-based full-system memory pooling framework at the USENIX ATC conference in Boston last year. This May they showed CXL3.0 technology that accelerates data centre AI applications.
At the recent Flash Memory Summit 2023 in Santa Clara, California, the company discussed a full system, from devices to operating systems, connected through a multi-level switch architecture supporting CXL 3.0 that it has developed.
This includes a technology to boost the use of solid state drives. The CXL interface allows an SSD to be used as a huge memory device.
However, systems employing CXL-SSDs may encounter long latency of SSD, when cache miss occurs. Panmnesia has developed machine learning-based prefetching techniques capable of predicting future memory access information and reading it prior to the actual request. This CXL-SSD host-side caching accurately forecasts future access addresses and determines the optimal prefetching timing.
“The CXL ecosystem has yet to mature fully. Without a comprehensive support framework spanning hardware, software, and the full stack, it’s difficult to harness the proper performance capabilities that CXL offers,” said Jung.
- CXL smart memory controllers for data centres
- Software defined memory fabric drives IP maker into chips
The funding will be used to refine its CXL3.0 semiconductor technology and develop additional solutions to speed up AI applications and massive parallel data processing through CXL.
“Although many companies have shown interest in CXL, products that effectively employ CXL technology are still hard to find,” said Jung. “Panmnesia will not stop at technological development; we will play a pivotal role in expanding the CXL ecosystem.”
The seed round values the company at $81m and was led by Daekyo Investment with a consortium that includes SL Investment, Smilegate Investment, GNTech Venture Capital, Time Works Investment, Yuanta Investment, and Quantum Ventures Korea.
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