- Chip interconnect startup Eliyan Corp. today announced that it has secured $60 million in new funding from a group of prominent investors.
- Samsung Catalyst Fund and Tiger Global Management both led the round to help the team address the challenges of the development of generative AI chips.
- Eliyan offers an interconnect called NuLink. Besides linking together chiplets into processors, the technology also lends itself to connecting processors with memory modules.
Eliyan has raised $60 million in funding for its chiplet interconnect technology that speeds up the processing for AI chips.
Funding from other compannies
Samsung Catalyst Fund and Tiger Global led the Series B round. They were joined by several other institutional backers, including Intel Capital and SK Hynix, one of the world’s largest memory chip manufacturers. The raise follows a US$40 million Series A round that Eliyan closed in 2022.
“This investment reflects the confidence in our approach to integrating multichip architectures that address the critical challenges of high costs, low yield, power consumption, manufacturing complexity, and size limitations,” said Eliyan co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ramin Farjadrad.
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The special technology NuLink
Eliyan offers an interconnect technology called NuLink. In addition to connecting small chips to the processor, the technology is also suitable for connecting the processor to memory modules. Certain chips, especially AI accelerators, contain large amounts of integrated memory for holding application data.
Eliyan’s chiplet interconnect technology achieves up to four times the performance and half the power of other solutions, the company said.
Besides boosting chip speeds, NuLink can also ease processor development.
Interconnects are usually implemented in the form of a so-called intermediary layer.
This is a flat, rectangular piece of silicon that both moves data between a processor’s small chips and functions as the processor’s base layer. The small chips are placed on top of the interposer during manufacturing.
Interposers enable fast data transfer speeds but can be difficult to design and manufacture. According to Eliyan, its NuLink technology provides a simpler alternative that reduces the amount of effort to develop new processors.
Eliyan’s latest round of funding comes on the heels of a major technical milestone. The company revealed today that it recently completed a new iteration of NuLink based on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s latest three-nanometer manufacturing process.
According to the company, the upgraded interconnect can process up to 64 gigabits of data traffic per second per link.
