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Q/C Technologies, Inc.., a developer of next-generation optical computing solutions, announced a collaboration with the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) at Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) to advance its proprietary optical processing unit (OPU) initiative for artificial intelligence inference. The Company is pioneering next-generation optical computing solutions designed to harness the properties of light to perform complex computations naturally via interference.
Sandia is one of the nation’s leading multi-mission science and engineering laboratories, operated for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With approximately 17,000 employees and an annual budget of approximately $5 billion, Sandia has deep capabilities spanning microelectronics, photonics, advanced materials, high-performance computing and systems engineering.
The Company’s collaboration with Sandia’s CINT focuses on joint research on nanophotonic components and the physical building blocks required for scalable optical AI processing. The project aims to establish and verify a defensible roadmap for optical AI hardware beyond incremental GPU scaling by identifying and prioritizing optical operations and device technologies for Q/C’s OPU architecture and addressing key challenges including nonlinear operations, memory, precision, optical loss and integration with electronic systems.
“Access to CINT’s scientific expertise and advanced research capabilities in photonics and nanoscale technologies represents an important step as we develop our proprietary optical computing platform,” said Joshua Silverman, Executive Chairman of Q/C Technologies. “As AI infrastructure faces increasing constraints in power consumption, bandwidth and scalability, we believe optical computing has the potential to fundamentally change how computationally intensive AI workloads are processed. This collaboration will help us evaluate key architectural concepts as we continue building the foundation for our next-generation optical computing solution.”
“This collaboration provides an opportunity to accelerate our work toward a practical, scalable optical computing architecture,” said Yossef Ehrlichman, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer at Q/C Technologies. “We believe this work with CINT will help us define the pathway from fundamental optical capabilities to an integrated OPU architecture.”
The new collaboration represents another milestone in Q/C Technologies’ OPU initiative. The Company recently established a 4,800-square-foot integrated photonics laboratory in San Francisco and continues to build its foundation of knowledge and engineering expertise in AI, photonics and computing to support development of its proprietary OPU architecture.
