SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP288: How Alphawave Semi Enables Next Generation Connectivity with Bharat Tailor

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Dan is joined by Bharat Tailor who is responsible for the Alphawave standard connectivity products portfolio focused on DSP chipsets enabling AI data center interconnects. He is a veteran of the high-speed connectivity semiconductor industry having participated in the evolution of connectivity technologies from 10Gbps … Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of SemiWiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Bharat Taylor. Bharat is responsible for the AlphaWave standard connectivity products portfolio focused on DSP chipsets, enabling AI data center interconnects. He is a veteran of the high speed connectivity semiconductor industry, having participated in the evolution of connectivity technologies from 10 gigabytes per second to the current discussions on 3.2 terabytes and beyond.

Welcome to the podcast, Bharat. Thank you, Daniel. Pleasure to be here. So how did you first get into the semiconductor industry? Do you have a story you can share with us? Yeah, certainly. I began my career working as an electrical engineer on a number of interesting projects,

all of which were one of designs built for specific customer needs. And early in my engineering career, I realized I was drawn by the business side as I was to the technology side as well. So at some point, I decided I wanted to work at the intersection of business and technology. And what I really realized is I wanted to work on product management, on products that are not one-off, but one which you design and build and then ship hundreds of thousands or millions of. And I got an opportunity to enter the semiconductor space working for a small Canadian company an opportunity to enter the semiconductor space working for a small Canadian company called Genome Corporation to help them establish a business designing and manufacturing chips for optical transceivers and backplane interconnects. This turned out to be my calling and I've spent more than 25 years in this high-speed interconnect business in the semiconductor industry.

speed interconnect business in the semiconductor industry. That's a good story. So what brought you to AlphaWave? So the AlphaWave founders were known to me because the company they had worked for early in their career was acquired by Genome corporations. Our paths had crossed many years earlier. As the high-speed interconnect industry evolved and Alphawave IP decided to make the transition to products,

they reached out to me to see if I was interested in joining them to help start a product line and and so join AlphaWay about three years ago to help build their product lines. Yeah you know I've been working with AlphaWay for a while from my wiki standpoint and it's a great company I'm really impressed with the leadership so let's get into it. What are you seeing in the AI interconnect space? Yeah, so in the AI space, connectivity is a very critical topic.

As the industry is looking to chart a path to interconnecting million plus GPUs, there are a number of interesting problems to be solved to make this possible. And AlphaWave Semi is participating in a number of these solution spaces. Let's start with getting high bandwidth of a chip with limited beachfront. one needs to increase the density of interconnect, like terabits per millimeter, or increase the speed, terabits per second, per pin. So, AlphaWave Semi offers solutions along both of these vectors.

First on density, our UCIE-based Chiplier initiative is seeking to support higher bandwidth interconnects within a given beachfront. And then on our CERDES IP side, we offer best-in-class performance with highly optimized power and area to enable this high density. On the speed vector, our latest IP supports 224 gigabits per second data rates, and we're actively working towards 448 gigabits per second. And the next data rate has really become a hot topic.

And at recent OFC conferences in San Francisco, there were many demonstrations of optical and service technologies to enable these interconnects at 448 gigabits per second. Now, another trend we're seeing in the interconnect space is that with the large power consumption and area required to house ever growing AI clusters, is distributed data centers are really becoming a necessity. And AlphaWave semi-invested early in a technology called coherent light through our acquisition of Banius Labs

in 2022. Through this team, we've created a low latency coherent light DSP solution that can support 800 gigabit per second links at up to 20 kilometer distances. And at a lower price point than traditional coherent technology, which is used for longer reach application. So, and actually coherent light was another major topic of discussion at OFC in San Francisco as well. Yeah, I was at OFC as I saw you guys there. And what surprised me is the volume of people.

I mean, there were so many people there. It was such a packed conference. And, you know, specifically data centers and AI interconnect space was just a huge topic. So, you know, I want to ask you, how has AlphaWave strategy and products offering evolved since the emergence of large language models and generative AI? You know, how has this changed your approach? Right. So in early in 2023, AlphaWave changed its name from AlphaWave IP to AlphaWave Semi. And that's because we had made a very significant change

in our strategy, which was to offer more choices to customers in terms of how they consume our technology. So while high speed interconnect IP remains a core part of our business, we leveraged that IP, our chiplets, and our 2.5D 3D packaging capabilities to offer custom silicon services. And finally we are leveraging our leading high-speed certified IP to offer standard connectivity products, which we only revealed ahead of OFC in March this year. And the important thing to note here is that AlphaWave Semi has transitioned to a semiconductor

company since three out of four solutions that we offer are delivered in the form of physical silicon chips. And now just to give you a bit more detail, what we reveal ahead of OFC is a portfolio of PAMS-4 and coherent light DSPs. These products enable links of a few meters to tens of kilometers. Our Q-Wave line of products addressed link lengths of two to five meters based on PAMFOR active electrical cables or AEC as they're more generally known.

Our O-Wave line of products addressed up to 10 kilometer reach over fiber based on PAM-4, optical transceivers, or active optical cables. Finally, our Colway line of products address up to 20 kilometer reach based on coherent light optical transceivers. Now, all our products incorporate our wide-eye DSP technology, which is a series of proprietary DSP tools and techniques that enable high performance and low power consumption. Our products also integrate our IQ suite of

diagnostics and monitoring capabilities. These tools are not only valuable in the debug phase of a design, but also in enabling monitoring of link health after deployment. So in summary, AlphaWave has really aligned its strategy to fully participate in the AI opportunity. Interesting. So why did AlphaWave Semi decide to enter the connectivity product space? So as I said, the AlphaWave Semi strategy is to enable customers to consume our products in whatever form they prefer, whether it's IP, custom silicon, or hardened IP in the form of standard products or chiplets. And from a connectivity business perspective, entering that space is really about scaling out our business

by leveraging our assets to its fullest. And we began development of our product portfolio about three years ago. And in that development of our product portfolio about three years ago. And in that span of time, our team has done a remarkable job of delivering three silicon platforms, our Q-Wave DSPs for AECs, O-Wave DSPs for PAM-4 optical transceivers,

and Co-Wave DSPs for coherent light optical modules. and co-wave DSPs for coherent light optical modules. Right. So what value does the AlphaWave semi-profile bring to the end customer base? Who are you working with and what are your targets? Customers want diversity and choice in their supply chain. Yet they want suppliers that can offer more than just a single point product.

So our approach was to build out a portfolio of products that addresses high speed serial connectivity needs of hyperscale data center customers. And those high speed serial products are based on PAMFOR and coherent light DSPs. This places AlphaWave in a select group of companies that can offer both of these technologies. Yet we are more unique in being a pure-place semiconductor company that does not compete with its customers in terms of offering a next-level product such as an optical transceiver or an active electrical cable in addition to the chips. So how has the end customer

experience been with your products? You know what kind of feedback do you have? So our first prototype product to enter hyperscalers labs was our O-Wave 800G PAM-4 DSP, which is our 100G per lane product addressing intra data center links. The hyperscale customer was pleased that in our first attempt, we were able to demonstrate good interoperability with a combination of different optical transmitters, DSPs, and TIAs in a variety of optical modules that they had either already deployed or were in the process of deploying. And we were able to demonstrate this interoperability because And we were able to demonstrate this interoperability because the DSP-based high-speed SIRDES,

which forms the basis for this product, had been deployed in a variety of customer chip designs. And the firmware for this had been hardened over a variety of interconnect channels and variety of devices on the other end of the link as well. And then on the coherent light space, our product was actually designed in conjunction

with a major hyperscale customer. We first demonstrated this pioneering coherent light technology privately to our customers at OFC in 2023. We have now reached a stage where optical modules with our DSP will enter qualifications cycle at our hyperscale customer as well. Excellent. So what are the next steps for connectivity products? Give us a little bit of future look. Yeah, so we are at a very exciting juncture for this industry as

AI is requiring ever faster innovation and ever faster interconnects. But from a standards connectivity product supplier perspective, our next steps are pretty clear. Bring our portfolio of products to deployment with multiple hyperscale customers and deliver the next set of solutions for 448 gigabit per second connectivity as quickly as possible. As you know, in the AI space, you can't get there quickly enough. There's demand out there.

If we can supply it, they can take it now. Now, having said that, 448 gigabit per second transmission does bring some interesting challenges with it. Traditional switch architectures had defined chip-to-module interfaces, which weren't typically very high-loss channels. At 448 gigabit per second, PAM4 signaling may not even be possible

over the traditional chip-to-module interface. Even using newer co-packaged copper approach is challenging to make work at 448 gigabit per second using PAM for signaling. So the connector ecosystem is working really hard to enable better technology to see if PAM4 or perhaps alternative options like PAM6 or PAM8 will end up as the preferred approach. Now that's for electrical connections. For optical interconnect,

there is consensus in the industry that PAM4 is still the right approach. And a number of optical transmitter technologies were demonstrated at the recent OFC. However, the challenge with transmission speeds moving from 224 gigabits per second to 448 gigabits per second is that in doubling the speed, we are actually quadrupling the chromatic dispersion experienced as the signal goes over fiber. At 448 gigabits per second, the reach is likely to be limited to something in the half kilometer to one kilometer range where traditionally inside the data center links have been defined to

be up to two kilometers reach. So this is actually a great opportunity for our coherent light technology to fill the gap in the inside data center space, in addition to the interconnection of data centers space that it already serves. So this is just a sample of opportunities we expect to be able to address with AlphaBase technology portfolio. Great, thank you, Bharat, a great conversation. I see you guys at the conferences. You're very active, which I appreciate.

You have a great booth full of demos and technology. So I'm sure we'll see you at the next conference. Looking forward to seeing you there. Thank you for having me here. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.