Q.ANT opens pilot line for optical processor production
Startup Q.ANT GmbH (Stuttgart, Germany) has held a launch event to mark the start of production of lithium niobate optical processors on 6-inch wafers.
The company is making use of cleanrooms and equipment belonging to the Institute of Microelectronics Stuttgart (IMS) conventionally used for CMOS production. Q.ANT has invested €14 million in its own tools to complement IMS equipment and create a pilot production line for thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) circuits.
The development was also hailed as a blueprint for strengthening chip sovereignty in Germany and Europe.
The use of optical processing rather than electrons delivers a 30-fold increase in energy efficiency and a 50-fold boost in computing speed, Q.ANT claims. In addition, it uses much larger geometry feature sizes than leading-edge electronic circuits.
TFLN
At the heart of Q.ANT’s offering are thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) on insulator die that contain configurable arrays of optical modulators. The die have multiple laser light inputs and multiple optical outputs and form what the company calls a Native Processing Unit (NPU).
To make access to the NPU seamless for users of conventional AI/ML servers, Q.ANT has developed a firmware/software stack for electro-optic control named LENA for Light Empowered Native Arithmetics. The product is compatible with existing computing ecosystem as it comes on the industry-standard PCI-Express or can be provided as a populated rack.
CEO Michael Förtsch, told eeNews Europe that although manufacturing has started on 6-inch wafers the line has been set up for 200mm-diameter wafers. Currently capable of producing 1,000 wafers per year, there is potential to scale production to about 10,000 wafer starts per year, Förtsch said.
Upcycling mature fabs
As optical processing of information achieves performance and energy efficiency through parallel optical operations it is possible to turn a mature CMOS wafer fab into leading-edge optical fab. “You can up-cycle older fabs for photonic chips,” said Förtsch. He emphasized that this is positive for European resilience and independence.
To achieve further scaling Q,ANT would look to repeat the development in a different mature wafer fab, he added.
At present Q.ANT is supplying a single NPU on a single PCIe card within a single rack. The 2.5 year goal is to increase this to 16 PCIe cards in a 3U rack, Förtsch said.
“This pilot line at IMS CHIPS demonstrates how transformative technologies can thrive on existing infrastructure, setting a blueprint for energy-efficient next-generation computing,” said Professor Jens Anders, director of the IMS CHIPS foundry operation.
Q.ANT’s Native Processing Servers can accelerate:
- AI model training and inference
- Scientific and engineering simulations
- Real-time processing of complex mathematical equations
- High-density tensor operations for machine learning
“We are not replacing GPUs – we are reshaping the next generation compute ecosystem. Just as GPUs have complemented CPUs, photonics will enable the next leap in AI – sustainably,” said Förtsch.
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