Imec spinoff Vertical Compute tackles memory bottleneck

Vertical Compute, a startup developing a novel vertical integrated memory and compute technology, has raised 20 million euros in seed capital from several investors led by Imec.xpand. Based on an invention from Imec, the young firm with offices across Europe is targeting the so-called memory wall, a term used to describe the growing bottleneck of data exchange between processors and working memory. This is holding back the advancement of large language models and generative AI, which require massive amounts of data movement.

“Memory technologies face limitations in both density and performance scaling, while processor performance continues to surge. The extreme data access requirements of AI workloads exacerbate this challenge, making it imperative to overcome the memory wall to enable the next wave of AI innovations. We believe going vertical is the path to 100x gains”, says Sébastien Couet, CTO of Vertical Compute and former Imec program director.

Vertical Compute is developing a chiplet-based solution leveraging a new way to store bits in a high-aspect-ratio vertical structure. The main innovation resides in the integration of vertical data lanes on top of computation units. It has the potential to outperform DRAM in terms of density, cost and energy by reducing data movements from centimeters to nanometers.

“The surge in data-intensive applications like generative AI demands a drastic new approach to transferring data between computing cores and memory units. Our solution is designed to overcome the fundamental scaling limitations of memory technologies by going vertical. We’re committed to unlocking the full potential of large language models on the edge without any compromise”, says Sylvain Dubois, CEO of Vertical Compute.

Vertical Compute is headquartered in Louvain-La-Neuve and has R&D offices in Leuven, Grenoble and Nice.