Ayar Labs Marks Continued Growth with New Financing from Silicon Valley Bank, DARPA Research Contract, and Strategic Technical Hire from UC Berkeley

SANTA CLARA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Ayar Labs is pleased to announce that it has secured additional funding
to fuel its growth as it drives to productize its TeraPHY optical I/O
chiplets and SuperNova multi-wavelength lasers in 2019. The funding
comes on the heels of the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC), where there
was significant industry focus on the need for integrating silicon
photonics based optical interconnect into semiconductor packages – a
technique that promises to dramatically improve application performance,
significantly reduce power consumption, and reduce overall datacenter
platform costs for the Artificial Intelligence, High Performance
Computing, Cloud, and Telecom markets.

“Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has a long history of supporting promising
technology companies,” said Lafe Vittitoe, Managing Director at Silicon
Valley Bank. “Ayar Labs has everything we look for in an investment —
differentiated technology that addresses a large market opportunity,
strong management and technology teams, and committed investors. We look
forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Ayar Labs.”

The funding, which totals $3M, comes in the form of a flexible draw down
term loan and will be used on specific capital and manufacturing related
expenditures as Ayar Labs ramps sampling and production. “SVB is a
strategic long-term partner on our journey to bring our revolutionary
technology to market,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. “Our
customers and partners are excited at the progress we’re making; SVB’s
investment will fuel our growth and accelerate our volume product
introduction.”

Ayar Labs is also pleased to announce that it has been awarded a DARPA
grant as part of the “Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability”
(PIPES) program, a research initiative that seeks to develop
high-bandwidth optical signaling technologies for digital
microelectronics. Through the grant, Ayar Labs will work to accelerate
the adoption and integration of the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB), a
royalty-free high-bandwidth electrical interconnect standard, which will
be used to link third-party chips to TeraPHY.

Additionally, to support its growing design win activities, Vladimir
Stojanovic, a co-founder of Ayar Labs and Associate Professor of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of
California at Berkeley, will be joining Ayar Labs in a full-time
capacity to lead system architecture.

About Ayar Labs

Ayar Labs is disrupting the traditional performance, cost, and
efficiency curves of the semiconductor and computing industries by
driving a 1000x improvement in interconnect bandwidth density at 10x
lower power. Ayar Labs’ patented approach uses industry standard
cost-effective silicon processing techniques to develop high speed, high
density, low power optical based interconnect “chiplets” and lasers to
replace traditional electrical based IO. The company was founded in 2015
and is funded by Playground Global, Intel Capital, Global Foundries, and
Founders Fund. For more information, please visit http://www.ayarlabs.com.

Contacts

Hugo Saleh
info@ayarlabs.com