Photonics - Salience Labs: Plugging into 32-port all-optical silicon photonic switching
Photonics has many aspects, functions and roles when applied to the modern enterprise software stack.
One of its primary first touchpoints is its ability to transform the networking layer of AI datacentre infrastructure.
This is where Salience Labs Limited is aiming to position its photonic solutions that target connectivity for AI datacentre infrastructure.
The company has now detailed the availability of what is claimed to be the industry’s “highest performing” all-optical 32-port switch.
Designed to unlock peak performance in AI datacentres, Salience Labs’ all-optical switch technology improves network latency, throughput and reliability metrics while lowering power consumption.
All-optical circuit switches
The 32-port product is the first product in Salience Labs’ suite of all-optical circuit switch (OCS) products, which also includes 64- and 128-port technologies to meet the capacity and bandwidth needs of AI datacentres.
Demand for AI-ready capacity continues to grow exponentially. According to ABI Research, global datacenter capacity is forecasted to grow sixfold between 2025 and 2035, climbing from 24.4 Gigawatts (GW) to 147.1 GW. This growth is driven by enterprise AI adoption, hyperscale expansion and increasing rack-level power density. As the need for datacenter capacity grows, so do challenges around network bottlenecks that directly have an impact on performance, efficiency, power consumption and cost.
Transceiver believer
Salience Labs says its all-optical, fully integrated switch architecture is purpose-built to address these exact challenges and be compatible with existing transceivers and infrastructure.
The company’s integrated switch technology is designed to be deployed at scale to connect thousands of GPUs across multiple racks for optimal scale-up and scale-out network performance in AI datacentres.
“Optical switching is moving networks from electronic packet routing to highly predictable, energy-efficient optical connectivity. We are transforming the networking layer, unlocking the ability to extend scale-up and scale-out networks across the datacenter,” said Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs. “Our dedicated team of researchers and engineers has a clear product roadmap, delivering all-optical switches that improve latency to increase performance and enhance end-user experience to unlock true value from AI.”
Salience Labs’ optical switch product line focuses on improving performance through:
- Power Consumption: Eliminates the need for optical transceivers with savings up to 8X on power versus current OEO switching solutions.
- Network Latency: Reduces overall network latency and removes tail latency, resulting in up to 80% improvement in Tokens per Second / User, a critical AI workload metric that defines customer experience.
- System Costs: Removes the need for optical transceivers with traditional EPS.
- High bandwidth: Supports latest data-rates, tested at up to 200G (100 Gbaud PAM4) encoding.
- Small Form Factor: Fits easily into a fraction of the 1RU footprint and is essential as datacenters expand to meet increased demand for compute.
According to Dell’Oro Group, datacenter switch spending in AI back-end networks will exceed $100 billion by 2030 due to a rise in deployments across scale-up, scale-out and scale across domains. As the adoption of optics in datacenter networks continues to grow, Salience Labs is meeting these needs through a vibrant partner ecosystem designed to foster future innovation.
High-performing AI datacenters
By working closely with partners across the datacenter, networking and cloud ecosystems, Salience Labs is driving interoperability and enabling customers to deploy solutions with confidence at scale. Collaborations with Tower Semiconductor, Keysight Technologies and other industry-leading organisations position Salience Labs as the company best equipped to enable the next generation of high-performing AI datacenters.
“As the adoption of AI technologies increases across industries, innovation in networking, such as optical circuit switching, is critical to meet the rapidly growing demands of AI workloads,” said Dr. Ed Preisler, vice president and general manager of RF business unit at Tower Semiconductor. “Our partnership with Salience to develop advanced photonic integrated circuits (PIC)-based optical OCS for AI infrastructure built on Tower’s market-leading Silicon Photonics platform, is set to support customers in confidently scaling from development to high-volume production.”
Salience Labs CEO Kewada says its collaborations unlock new use cases across data-intensive and performance-critical environments, removing the current bottlenecks. Salience Labs’ OCS product line delivers the reliability, low-latency and high-bandwidth networking required by today’s AI datacenters and into the future.
