Salience Labs ships 32-port all-optical silicon photonic switch for AI datacenters

Salience Labs said it has made available an all-optical 32-port silicon photonic switch aimed at the networking layer of AI data center infrastructure. The company positions the product as an optical circuit switch (OCS) intended to improve latency, throughput, and reliability metrics while lowering power consumption.

The 32-port switch is the first product in Salience Labs’ OCS product line, which the company said also includes 64- and 128-port technologies on its roadmap. Salience Labs also said its “fully integrated” all-optical switch architecture is designed to be compatible with existing transceivers and infrastructure, and to deploy at scale to connect “thousands of GPUs across multiple racks” for scale-up and scale-out networking in AI data centers.

On performance claims, Salience Labs highlights several engineering targets for the product line, including power reduction by “eliminat[ing] the need for optical transceivers,” with “savings up to 8X on power versus current OEO switching solutions.” For latency, the company claims the approach “reduces overall network latency and removes tail latency,” and ties that to “up to 80% improvement in Tokens per Second / User.” On bandwidth, Salience Labs said the switch supports “latest data-rates,” and has been “tested at up to 200G (100 Gbaud PAM4) encoding.” The company also claims a small form factor that “fits easily into a fraction of the 1RU footprint.”

All-optical circuit switching is being pitched here as a way to shift some connectivity away from electronic packet routing for more predictable optical paths. In data center terms, the promise is less contention and lower incremental power per connection when networks are pushed by AI training and inference traffic patterns. But Salience Labs’ big quantitative claims (8X power savings and up to 80% Tokens-per-Second/User improvement) will depend heavily on topology, traffic mix, and exactly what’s being replaced in a given network design.

Salience Labs also framed the launch around partner work intended to support interoperability and manufacturing. The company cited collaborations with Tower Semiconductor and Keysight Technologies.

“Optical switching is moving networks from electronic packet routing to highly predictable, energy-efficient optical connectivity,” said Vaysh Kewada, CEO and co-founder of Salience Labs.

“Our partnership with Salience to develop advanced photonic integrated circuits (PIC)-based optical OCS for AI infrastructure built on Tower’s market-leading Silicon Photonics platform, is set to support customers in confidently scaling from development to high-volume production,” said Dr. Ed Preisler, Vice President and General Manager of RF Business Unit at Tower Semiconductor.

“Through our collaboration with Salience Labs, we are showcasing an optical circuit switch test using Keysight AI Data Center Builder that demonstrates how these innovations can improve bandwidth efficiency and reduce latency for AI workloads,” said Ram Periakaruppan, Vice President and General Manager of Network Test & Security Solutions at Keysight.

Salience Labs did not provide pricing details in the announcement.