Luxtera Revenue and Competitors

Traditional electrical connectivity is a remarkably robust technology which has provided many generations of bandwidth for applications ranging from Local Areas Network (LAN) to chip-to-chip interconnect. However, as bandwidth requirements scale up to and beyond 10 gigabits per second per channel, electrical links become shorter in reach while consuming increasing power. Eventually at certain speeds, electrical connectivity becomes impractical. Photonics, the engineering of optical circuits, has been enormously successful at long distances, creating the basis for the telecom revolution. However, the high costs associated with photonics have prevented its mass-market adoption in shorter reach applications such as LANs. These costs are attributable to a combination of factors, most particularly the fact that photonic devices have traditionally been built using relatively exotic materials such as Indium Phosphide and Gallium Arsenide that are outside the manufacturing experience of the mainstream, silicon-centric semiconductor industry. Luxtera was formed in 2001 to take advantage of the fact that with production CMOS line widths in the vicinity of 100nm the CMOS process itself can be used to create an array of complex photonic devices. Luxtera’s CMOS Photonics™ devices are fully integrated with CMOS electronics and are also orders of magnitude smaller (and hence in many cases faster) than traditional photonic elements. Because Luxtera leverages the extraordinary economies and infrastructures of CMOS in terms of software, processing, testing and packaging, it is the first company to build photonic solutions that is truly “fabless” in the sense that from the very beginning Luxtera’s chips have been fabricated in one of the world’s major fine-line width production CMOS processes.

keywords:Semiconductors