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. 

It is claimed that photonics can vastly reduce power consumption and therefore accelerate compute speeds beyond what is possible with modern GPUs. However, the existing optical devices are too large to scale and this is where the metamaterials come into play. Metamaterials are electronic arrays that are structured to blend light in a variety of wavelengths, in a variety of ways, without the need for moving parts. Neurophos claims that these properties 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 8000 times 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. The data center market currently uses traditional silicon semiconductors that create a huge amount of heat and are struggling to scale to the performance demands of LLM for AI. 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’s metamaterial-based optical modulators are more than 1000 times 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 both 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 chip. This results in an significant increase in the computational density. 

Neurophos is joining the 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 into the market by the year 2027. 

Funding and Financials

Neurophos is one the first companies to receive pre-seed support from MetaVC Partners, a metamaterials-centric venture fund backed by Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold.

In December 2023 , Neurophos secured USD 7.2 million in a seed funding round led by Gates Frontier, with the participation of MetaVC, Mana Ventures, and others. The funds will be used to advance Neurophos’ breakthrough in metamaterials and optical AI inference chips.