Optalysys (Pontefract, England) has launched a Series A funding round to support product commercialization activities up to the first product launches in 2017. The company is a 2013 spin-off from Cambridge University and has declared that it is only days away from launching a prototype optical processor with the potential to realize Exascale levels of processing power on a desktop sized computer at a fraction of the energy consumption and cost of conventional supercomputers and high performance computing (HPC) technology.
Grant Thornton UK LLP is supporting the Series A funding round. Darren Bear, partner at Grant Thornton UK, notes “This is a unique opportunity to provide funding to support the development of disruptive optical processing technology.” Optalysys CEO, Nick New, adds, “Optalysys’ technology will deliver processing power beyond the capabilities of traditional HPC methods. This investment will support us in bringing our initial products to market in 2017.”
Related Article:Startup Optalysys aims to demo gigaFLOPS-scale optical processor in January 2015, with video explaining how it works
The company says its technology applies the principles of diffractive and Fourier optics to calculate the same processor intensive mathematical functions used in computational fluid dynamics and pattern recognition. Using low-power lasers and high-resolution liquid-crystal microdisplays, calculations are performed in parallel at the speed of light.
Source: Optalysys