In a strategic move aimed at accelerating its growth and advancing breakthroughs in silicon photonics, Ayar Labs has welcomed two distinguished figures to its Board of Directors and appointed a Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The company, recognized for its pioneering work in chip-to-chip connectivity using optical I/O, announced the addition of Ganesh Moorthy, President and CEO of Microchip Technology Inc., and Craig Barratt, former CEO of Atheros and current Chair of the Board of Intuitive Surgical, to its Board. Simultaneously, Ayar Labs co-founder Vladimir Stojanovic has been named as the Chief Technology Officer.
Mark Wade, Ayar Labs CEO, expressed enthusiasm about the new additions to the leadership team, stating, “Ganesh, Craig, and Vladimir are powerhouse additions to our team, and each will play a critical role as we move our technologies into production maturity. Their collective knowledge and experience will help us accelerate our roadmap leadership, and deliver the transformative value of optical I/O in AI systems, high-performance computing, and next-generation data center system architectures.”
Ganesh Moorthy, bringing over four decades of executive leadership and semiconductor industry experience, emphasized the significance of Ayar Labs’ work in making optical I/O a reality. He highlighted the company’s role in addressing performance and power bottlenecks in traditional electrical-based interconnects and expressed excitement about contributing to Ayar Labs’ expansion across the industry.
Craig Barratt, a seasoned technology entrepreneur, acknowledged the crucial role of optical I/O in overcoming data movement challenges in computing systems. Barratt, with a track record of successful ventures in the technology sector, aims to leverage his background in semiconductor technologies to accelerate Ayar Labs’ growth.
Vladimir Stojanovic, known for his innovations in photonics and semiconductor technologies, assumes the role of Chief Technology Officer. Stojanovic’s expertise, as demonstrated through his contributions to Ayar Labs and other ventures, has been recognized with his recent appointment as an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to electronic-photonic design and system-on-chip integration.
These strategic additions to Ayar Labs’ leadership team follow the company’s impressive momentum in 2023, marked by technology breakthroughs and significant progress with customers and partners. Ayar Labs showcased the industry’s first 4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) optical solution, demonstrating data transfer capabilities crucial for data-intensive workloads such as generative AI and machine learning.
Furthermore, Ayar Labs recently demonstrated an in-package optical I/O solution integrated with Intel’s Agilex® FPGA technology, promising substantial improvements in bandwidth, power efficiency, and latency. This development aligns with the company’s commitment to supporting novel disaggregated compute and memory architectures.
