At a glance
| Booth | I3000 |
| Country | GB |
| Website | hartleyultrafast.com |
Company profile
Hartley Ultrafast is a Bristol, UK deep-tech hardware company building the fastest AI decision-making silicon on Earth, using light. Most AI inference hardware is built for scale and throughput. For a growing class of latency-critical applications, that isn't enough: a decision has to beat a competitor, or beat a physical process, to matter. Hartley's optoelectronic architecture computes small, dense neural networks directly in the analogue, photonic domain, delivering inference in nanoseconds rather than microseconds, while presenting a standard UCIe chiplet interface that integrates into existing CPU, FPGA, and SoC designs without redesigning the host system. Our in-house proof-of-concept, Babbage, has demonstrated end-to-end inference in 176 nanoseconds. Clockwork, our first production timing chip, tapes out on an advanced RF process in Q2 2026. We hold four patents filed on the core architecture. We are targeting the $162B market (2025, growing to $450B by 2030) for ultrafast decision-making across high-frequency trading, electronic warfare, communications and forward error correction, industrial process control, and AI acceleration: markets where every nanosecond of latency has measurable value. The founding team includes five PhDs in photonics, physics, and computer science. We are building the manufacturing, packaging, integration, and field-trial partnerships needed to bring nanosecond-class AI into production silicon.
Exhibits
Provides an optoelectronic AI-inference architecture that computes small, dense neural networks directly in the analogue photonic domain, using a standard UCIe chiplet interface for integration with existing CPU, FPGA, and SoC designs. Named products/prototypes include the Babbage proof of concept and the Clockwork timing chip.
Capabilities and products
- optoelectronic architecture for AI inference
- inference in nanoseconds rather than microseconds
- standard UCIe chiplet interface
- Babbage demonstrated end-to-end inference in 176 nanoseconds
- Clockwork timing chip tapes out in Q2 2026
- four patents filed on the core architecture
- applications in high-frequency trading and electronic warfare