Ayar Labs Wins TSMC Demo Award for Optical AI Interconnect
Ayar Labs won the Demo of the Year Award at the 2026 TSMC North America Technology Symposium for a manufacturing-ready optical interconnect system designed for AI scale-up. Visitors to TSMC’s “Innovate with TSMC!” Demo Zone selected the demonstration as the event’s most popular.
- Ayar Labs won the 2026 TSMC Demo of the Year Award.
- Visitors selected its optical AI interconnect demonstration as the most popular.
- The system uses TeraPHY™ optical engines and SuperNova™ light sources.
- Each of two AI accelerators is designed for more than 100 Tbps of bandwidth.
- The demonstration was developed with Wiwynn in a chassis-level AI server design.
Optical system wins visitor vote
The award-winning demonstration combined Ayar Labs’ optical engine technology with a chassis-level AI server reference design developed with Wiwynn. The system is designed to support multiple form factors, allowing it to meet different system and packaging requirements.
It pairs two AI accelerators, each equipped with eight TeraPHY™ optical engines. According to Ayar Labs, each accelerator can receive more than 100 terabits per second of bandwidth. The system uses SuperNova™ external light sources in the industry-standard ELSFP form factor.
The demonstration showed how optical connectivity can extend high-bandwidth scale-up beyond the rack, an approach aimed at connecting AI computing resources across larger systems.
TSMC platform supports photonic integration
Ayar Labs said its optical engines are built using TSMC’s Compact Universal Photonic Engine, or TSMC-COUPE™, platform. The platform is intended to support advanced photonic integration, fabrication and packaging, while providing the bandwidth, power efficiency, low latency and scalability needed to connect GPUs and accelerators across racks.
TeraPHY combines electronic and photonic functions in a compact optical engine for high-performance scale-up networking. Ayar Labs said the technology is designed for AI inference and agentic workloads.
“Being voted Demo of the Year by the TSMC community is a meaningful validation of our team’s work to bring optical interconnect solutions to AI scale-up,” Ayar Labs CEO and co-founder Mark Wade said. He added that scaling compute is increasingly about how systems are connected, as AI moves into what he called “the inference era.”
TSMC Vice President of Business Development Lipen Yuan said the companies’ work on TSMC-COUPE™ is supporting optical interconnect solutions for AI scale-up. According to Yuan, TSMC aims to provide customers with manufacturing capabilities and an ecosystem for developing AI infrastructure.
Award follows wider ecosystem activity
The recognition comes after several developments cited by Ayar Labs. The company said it raised $650 million in equity capital to scale manufacturing and joined NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem to bring co-packaged optics, or CPO, to rack-scale AI infrastructure.
Ayar Labs also said it recently joined Wiwynn and GUC for the first live demonstration of an integrated optical compute system at the OCP Global Summit 2026. That system paired GUC’s ASIC with Ayar Labs’ TeraPHY optical engine and SuperNova light source, and included real-time health telemetry.
For users and AI infrastructure developers, the award highlights growing interest in optical interconnects as a way to expand bandwidth beyond individual racks. The announcement does not provide a product release date or commercial availability details for the demonstrated system.
