Akhetonics nabs €6M to build a general-purpose optical processor – News

Startup Akhetonics GmbH has raised €6 million in funding for its optical chip technology, which can perform digital, analog and quantum computations in the same system.

News reported the investment today. The deal, which is described as a seed funding round, was led by Matterwave Ventures. It follows a €2.3 million raise in July.

Standard processors such as graphics cards represent data in the form of electrical signals. Germany-based Akhetonics is developing a chip that represents information as light. According to the company, its technology has the potential to cut servers’ cooling and power requirements while lowering application latency in the process. 

Encoding information into photons to move it across the network is already standard practice in data centers. However, using optical equipment to carry out computations has proven to be challenging. Akhetonics is one of several startups working to make this processing approach practical for production use.

The company’s chip is built around an optical computing module dubbed the XPU. It coordinates the flow of data among the chip’s other components. According to Akhetonics, processing is carried out by so-called RFU modules that are managed by the XPU.

The company’s RFUs can perform digital processing, a term for standard computations carried out using ones and zeros. They also lend themselves to analog computing. This is processing that isn’t done solely with ones and zeros, but rather electrical signals containing a broader range of data points. 

Chips based on an analog design typically perform auxiliary computing tasks such as amplifying Wi-Fi signals. In the case of Akhetonics’ processor, however, RPUs set to analog mode are used to run artificial intelligence models. Moreover, the company says that its RPUs are capable of functioning as a quantum computer.

The way light beams travel through a chip is influenced by its so-called refractive index. This is a property that determines the extent to which the path of photons changes when they enter a material. Akhetonics’ chip is made of multiple materials with different refractive indexes, an arrangement that the company says makes it easier to orchestrate the light beams inside. 

The processor can be made using legacy manufacturing nodes in the 90-nanometer to 250-nanometer range. According to Akhetonics, that makes the chip relatively inexpensive to produce. The company has developed a custom software toolkit, AtetDesigner, to translate its engineers’ processor blueprints into a file format that can be sent to fabs for manufacturing.

Akhetonics plans to start shipping prototype versions of its chip to early customers in mid-2025. The company will reportedly hire more employees using its new funding round to support the commercialization push.

Photo: Akhetonics