Bill Gates-backed silicon photonics startup develops optical transistors 10,000x smaller than current tech — optical chip can process 1,000 x 1,000 multiplication matrices

Silicon wafer closeup.

Neurophos, an AI chip started based in Austin, Texas and backed by Bill Gates’ Gates Frontier Fund, says that it has developed an optical processing unit (OPU) that the company claims is ten times more powerful than Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin NVL72 AI supercomputer in FP4 / INT4 compute workloads, while still consuming a similar amount of power. According to The Register, the company achieves this by using a larger matrix and a much higher clock speed.

“On chip, there is a single photonic sensor that is 1,000 by 1,000 in size,” Neurophos CEO Patrick Bowen told the publication. This is about 15 times larger than the usual 256 x 256 matrix used in most AI GPUs. Despite that, the company was able to make its optical transistor around 10,000 times smaller than what’s currently available. “The equivalent of the optical transistor that you get from Silicon Photonics factories today is massive. It’s like 2 mm long,” Bowen added. “You just can’t fit enough of them on a chip in order to get a compute density that remotely competes with digital CMOS today.”