Lightelligence

Lightelligence is a Boston-based optical computing startup founded in 2017, focused on developing integrated photonic solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing applications. The company's core technology is based on silicon photonics, which uses light instead of electrons to perform computations. Lightelligence's photonic chips aim to address the growing demand for computing power in AI applications while reducing energy consumption.

The company's technology leverages optical matrix multiplication to accelerate AI and deep learning workloads. In 2019, Lightelligence unveiled COMET, its first optical AI accelerator demo capable of recognizing handwritten digits. This was followed by the introduction of the Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE) in December 2021. PACE is an integrated optical computing system consisting of approximately 12,000 photonic devices running at one GHz, representing a significant advancement over COMET.

Lightelligence's PACE system has demonstrated superior performance in solving NP-Complete problems, such as the Ising model, graph max-cut, and graph min-cut problems. The company claims PACE can solve these problems up to 100 times faster than high-end GPUs and 25 times faster than purpose-built electronic systems. In July 2023, Lightelligence introduced Hummingbird, an Optical Network-on-Chip (oNOC) processor designed for data center communications and high-performance applications.

The company's technology combines optical and electrical components, with optical circuits performing analog computations and electronic memory handling data storage. Lightelligence uses standard silicon photonics integration and CMOS manufacturing processes, making its technology potentially scalable for mass production.