- 30th October 2006 -

Luxtera Demos Single-Chip CMOS 40-Gbit/sec WDM Technology

Carlsbad, CA, USA, based Luxtera Inc., the CMOS photonics specialist, announced its new technology that multiplexes four 10Gbps wavelengths onto a single fibre, on a production CMOS die – resulting in a single fibre 40Gbps link.
This advance reduces cost for high bandwidth interconnect over traditional parallel fibre solutions and paves the technological way for next generation 100Gbps Ethernet data centre connectivity.
Luxtera recently announced sampling of its single wavelength 10Gbps silicon photonics transceiver technology, implemented in standard SOI CMOS process with integrated InP laser light sources. By combining that technology with WDM capability, Luxtera is now the first photonics company to demonstrate a feasibility of applying Moore’s Law to fiber bandwidth scalability implemented in a low cost commercial CMOS fabrication process.
“This announcement is one in a series of ‘firsts’ for us at Luxtera,” said Cary Gunn, co-founder and CTO of Luxtera. “Just last month we announced that we are the first to sample monolithic devices containing combined lasers and CMOS photonic circuits in a commercially feasible transceiver configuration. With these announcements, we continue to strive to bring new technologies to market quickly while transforming the photonics industry as we know it today.”
The 40Gbps WDM technology development was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the Electronic and Photonic Integrated Circuits (EPIC) Phase One program. Successful completion of this phase paves the way for Luxtera to secure additional funding for subsequent EPIC program phases with the ultimate goal of delivering commercial quality high bandwidth transceiver technology.
Luxtera’s breakthrough technology integrates high-performance photonics and mainstream electronics on a single die, which along with integrated lasers brings fiber connectivity directly to the chip. Because Luxtera’s products are developed in a standard CMOS fabrication process, additional digital logic can be integrated into the same chip along with optical devices, further reducing overall solution size, power consumption and cost. Luxtera is currently sampling prototypes to development partners and the company will launch a commercial transceiver product line based on this underlying technology in 2007 – years ahead of the competition. Future applications will extend to chip-to-chip and intra-chip optical connectivity.

Web: www.luxtera.com