Neurophos

Neurophos is a spinout from Duke University and Metacept.Inc. that develops metamaterials and optical AI inference chips to decrease the size and energy needs of silicon photonic optical chips. 

Neurophos claims that using metamerials can reduce the size and energy requirements for photonic chips that could be tailor-made for AI platforms. Through metamaterials, Neurophos can shrink an optical processor by 8,000x, which gives orders of magnitude of improvement over GPUs and other AI processor architectures available today.

Neurophos’ optical metasurfaces are designed to be used in data centers and have been proven to significantly increase computational energy efficiency. Neurophos plans on using high-speed silicon photonics to drive a metasurface in-memory processor capable of fast and efficient AI computing. The company uses the same complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processors, which are typically used for creating large node processor chips.  

Neurophos’ metamaterial-based optical modulators are more than 1,000x smaller than those from a standard foundry Process Design Kit (PDK). This enables the delivery of over one million TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of performance. Neurophos combines an optical metasurface and a Compute-In-Memory (CIM) processor architecture. The optical metasurface enables silicon photonic computing capable of ultra-fast AI inference that outstrips the density and performance of traditional silicon computing and silicon photonics. The CIM processor architecture is made of high-speed silicon photonics to deliver fast, efficient matrix-matrix multiplications. 

The metasurface-enabled optical CIM elements are significantly smaller than traditional silicon photonics modulators, enabling the processing of vastly larger matrices on the chip. This results in a significant increase in the computational density. 

Neurophos is joining Silicon Catalyst, the world’s only incubator and accelerator focused on semiconductor solutions, to accelerate startups from idea to volume production. 

Neurophos claims that they are hoping to enter the market by 2027.