4 August 2016

Juniper to acquire silicon photonics firm Aurrion

According to a blog by founder Pradeep Sindhu, optical network product provider Juniper Networks Inc of Sunnyvale, CA, USA has entered into an agreement to acquire the fabless, privately held firm Aurrion of Santa Barbara, CA, USA.

Co-founded in 2008 with Dr Alexander Fang (CEO) and University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) professor John Bowers (chairman of the board), Aurrion has developed a hybrid silicon photonics platform that heterogeneously integrates indium phosphide (InP) optoelectronic materials .

Sindhu says that, over the past almost two decades, Juniper has dramatically reduced the cost-per-bit-per-second of the electronics portion of networking systems, but the optoelectronics portion has not followed a similar cost curve. Historically, the optoelectronics portion represented significantly less than half the cost of a networking system, especially for optoelectronics designed for short to medium distances. This has since completely reversed, so that the optoelectronics portion now represents significantly more than half the cost. But the explosive growth of video streaming, social networking and other bandwidth-intensive applications such as traffic between data centers means that there is ever increasing demand for greater bandwidth at decreasing cost and increasing flexibility.

Aurrion has developed technology that combines the economies of scale pioneered by the silicon industry with the unique properties of light to carry information over long distances at significantly lower cost. The end result, says Sindhu, is dramatically lower cost-per-bit-per-second for networking systems, higher capacities for networking interfaces, and greater flexibility in how bandwidth carried on light is processed inside the electronic portions of networking systems.

"Aurrion's breakthrough technology will result in fundamental and permanent improvements in cost-per-bit-per-second, power-per-bit-per-second, bandwidth density, and flexibility of networking systems," expects Sindhu. "If we couple this new technology with Juniper's history of bringing innovative networking products to market, we believe we can make significant improvements to the foundations of all of our networking products within a relatively short time," he adds. "This acquisition will strengthen Juniper's ability to bring the most advanced and most cost-effective network products to market more quickly," Sindhu believes.

Tags: III-Vs-on-Si silicon photonics

Visit: www.aurrion.com

Visit: www.juniper.net

Visit: https://labs.chem.ucsb.edu/bowers