Juniper eyes bandwidth-boosting potential of silicon photonics with the acquisition of fabless photonics manufacturer Aurrion for an undisclosed price.
“Aurrion has invented breakthrough 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," Juniper says. "The end result? 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."
Founded in 2008 by Intel/IBM alumnus Dr Alexander Fang, Aurrion managed to commercialise indium phosphide-based (InP) transceivers. This is key, since the tough part of silicon photonics is the manufacture of components allowing the integration of photonics technology with regular silicon. Juniper hopes Aurrion technology will allow it to "make significant improvements to the foundations of all networking products," specifically through higher capacity interfaces and more flexible switches.
According to MarketsandMarkets silicon photonics is one of the hottest networking segments-- the analyst forecasts the needs of high-bandwidth applications will drive the technology to a CAGR of over 22% during the 2016-2022 period, as well as a market worth around $1.07 billion by 2022. As such, Aurrion is hardly the only company involved in silicon photonics, and other key players include Cisco, IBM, Mellanox, Hamamatsu, STMicroelectronics and Luxtera.
