This is what the CEO of the young chip company Tremount says in a personal interview. the company Raised $8 million led by Grove Ventures to create the next generation of optical connectivity for the chip industry. Among other things, Dedi Perlmutter, former senior vice president at Intel and chairman of Tremount's board of directors, participated in the recruitment.
Teramount, a Jerusalem startup operating in the field of optical fibers and silicon photonics, andWe published news about him already in 2014 , announced today (Tuesday) the completion of a fundraising round of 8 million dollars led by Grove Ventures and with the participation of Amelia Investments, Daddy Perlmutter, former senior vice president of Intel worldwide who also serves as the chairman of the company's board of directors and other private investors.
The company's main product is called a photonic plug, and its role is to simplify the interface between the optical fibers and the silicon chips.
The company was registered in 2013, but practically began its activities in 2015 by Dr. Hisham Taha, the CEO of the company, and Dr. Avi Israel, the VP of Technologies, who founded it with the aim of enabling optical connectivity for transferring information at high speeds for farms Servers (Data Centers) and communication infrastructures of the next generation. The recruitment round will be used for the transition to production and will allow the company to double its workforce by the end of the year. The company has already started key recruitments for a variety of positions, including hardware engineers.
Dozens of fibers are connected to each chip instead of individual ones
The solution developed by Tremount, which it anchored in approved patents, presents a 100-fold improvement in the tolerance of connecting the optical fibers to silicon photonics chips compared to existing technologies on the market and also allows the integration of an increased amount of dozens of optical fibers with the silicon photonics chips (compared to the connection of a few fibers today ). In addition, the technology will enable a significant increase in the scope of implementing silicon photonics chips by standardizing the packaging process, similar to the process that currently exists in the field of semiconductors.
"The field of silicon photonics has reached maturity. So far there has been a bottleneck. The communication traffic to and from the data center is done using optical fibers, and the processing is done with silicon chips. The connection between them is done in a way that slows down the rate of data transfer, because it is impossible to connect more than a few fibers to the chips that the big companies such as Cisco and Intel are developing today for data centers."
"For several years there has been a serious problem of not knowing how to take the light in and out of the processors, turning the optics into bits back and forth. The system we developed constitutes the connection between the external world of optical fibers and the standard chips."
According to him, the day will not be far away and the traffic between neighboring chips inside the servers in the data center will be through an optical link, so that they can communicate with each other at the speed of light, while reducing energy consumption, which is a major expense factor in the operation of data centers.
According to Taha, in the future, the intention is to apply the technology also in the automotive sector ("a car is a data center on four wheels)" in advanced 5G networks, advanced sensing systems, smart transportation, heavy cloud computing, AI-based machines and more.
Doubling the number of employees
According to him, Grove Ventures' investment will allow Tremount to accelerate development and double the company's staff. "The current investment in the company indicates that the semiconductor industry recognizes the great promise inherent in the photonic-plug technology we have developed and believes in the realization of the tremendous potential inherent in silicon photonics and in the assimilation of the technology in the worlds of AI, 5G and more," says Hisham Taha, CEO of Tremount. "Now, after the excellent results we presented and with the support of the capital raised, we must realize the technological leap in production as well and gain a significant foothold in the market."
"Our clients are the giant technology companies, so we were looking for figures for the board of directors who have experience in such companies, because you need to know how to work with them, and of course Dedi Perlmutter and Lior Handelsman are at their head." Taha added.
"The never-ending need for high bandwidth in data centers (Data Centers) encourages the transition to optical connectivity, when considerations of power consumption and warming require the integration of optics directly into silicon switches," says Lior Handelsman, senior partner at Grove Ventures, which led the The investment in the company. "We believe that the lack of a reliable solution that allows connecting hundreds of fibers to a switch chip in data centers at an affordable price, has so far been the most significant factor that has prevented widespread adoption of silicon photonics-based switch products. Tramount's photonic-plug technology meets exactly the required need and solves the problem.'
Studies in improvised spaces
Taha and Avi Yisrael studied together at the Hebrew University, and worked in separate companies, while Taha gained international experience in the meantime, and after several years of cooking the idea, the company began operating in 2016. Today it has seven employees and is located in the high-tech complex on the campus of the Hebrew University, but there is no connection between the technology they developed and the Hebrew University, according to him, they also paid for the use of the university's clean room.
In the XNUMXs, the state of infrastructure in the Arab villages was extremely poor. But for Taha, the university was a corrective experience. He was born and raised in the village of Boina in the Beit Netufa Valley in the Galilee. In those years, there was only one elementary school in the village, whose structure was only enough for half the students. "It so happened that until the XNUMXth grade we studied in all kinds of spaces in the village, sometimes we had to change places because the owner of the building needed additional parking, once they had to call for help through the loudspeakers in the local mosque when the water flooded the basement where they were studying. In many cases, the students were dispersed in many spaces, with almost no communication between them."
"I studied in the first class that graduated high school in the village, until then the students studied outside the village. In high school he had a good physics teacher - sometimes a good teacher pulls in his direction. Then, after a period of various jobs, I was accepted to the Hebrew University and continued in physics. The friends in the village mocked me: "What will you do with physics? Will you go to work in a reactor in Dimona? After all, you will return to the village and become a teacher anyway."
When I started my studies, I realized that this is a very interesting field in which I can grow and do great things. In the company I worked for before, I got to meet almost every research group that deals in the field of photonics. I would travel a lot, from Japan in the east to California in the west. I learned how to work in an international company, and when my father and I founded the company we were able to use the knowledge I gained in the management field as well."
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