Pooya Tadayon joins Ayar Labs
The company says that Tadayon, who previously worked at Intel, will lead the creation of an efficient OSAT process to accelerate the adoption of Ayar Labs’ solutions
Ayar Labs, a company focusing on optical interconnect solutions for AI, has announced the appointment of Pooya Tadayon as its vice president of Packaging and Test. Tadayon was formerly a fellow and director of Assembly & Test Pathfinding within Intel’s Assembly and Test Technology Development group.
Ayar Labs says that Tadayon brings more than two and a half decades of experience, with a recent focus on advanced packaging technologies, as well as assembly and test solutions for co-packaged optics that can scale to high volume. He holds 47 patents and has over three dozen pending, in areas including test interconnect technology, thermal technology, and package/product architecture.
“The demand for photonics technology is rapidly increasing to meet the bandwidth and energy requirements of AI,” said Tadayon. “My goal at Ayar Labs is to accelerate assembly and test ecosystem maturation to support the volumes being projected for optical I/O in AI connectivity.”
According to Ayar Labs, Tadayon will lead the creation of an efficient OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) process that will enable the photonics ecosystem and accelerate the adoption of the company’s solutions.
“Pooya brings a strategic advantage to Ayar Labs with his deep expertise in solving complex packaging and testing challenges in large-scale, multi-die systems for high-volume manufacturing,” said Mark Wade, CEO and cofounder of Ayar Labs. “His pioneering work positions us to significantly increase production of our optical I/O solutions to millions of units of volume to meet the growing demand for AI scale-up fabrics.”
Ayar Labs says it partners with the world’s leading OSATs to ensure its optical I/O solutions can be manufactured at scale and integrated seamlessly into AI systems. In recent years, the company has also invested in hiring test, validation and equipment engineers, purchasing wafer testers, and developing a suite of tests for the optical and electrical interfaces of its chiplets.
With the addition of Tadayon to its team, Ayar Labs hopes to build on its momentum in the first half of 2024, including the addition of industry veterans to the company’s Board of Directors and a new CTO aimed at accelerating growth. At OFC 2024, Ayar Labs demonstrated its optical I/O solution with what it says is the industry’s first CW-WDM MSA-compliant 16-wavelength light source capable of driving 256 optical carriers to achieve 16T of bi-directional bandwidth – a level that’s essential for AI workloads.
