Tuesday, November 7, 2006

Luxtera Lands DARPA Grant for High Bandwidth CMOS Photonics Transceiver

Luxtera was awarded a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant for its work in CMOS photonics. Phase 1 of the Electronic and Photonic Integrated Circuits (EPIC) project resulted in the world's first 40Gbps DWDM single CMOS chip transceiver.



Phase II of the project will culminate in an even more highly integrated 40Gbps transceiver offering improved performance, smaller size and lower power than demonstrated in Phase I -- bringing key additional circuitry onto the single monolithic CMOS chip. The transceiver will also be designed so that it can seamlessly scale to a 100Gbps transceiver, which is the focus of the future, Phase III effort.



Luxtera's breakthrough CMOS Photonics technology integrates high-performance photonics and mainstream electronics on a single die, which along with integrated lasers brings fiber connectivity directly to the chip. Luxtera is currently sampling prototypes.

http://www.luxtera.com

  • The vision of the Electronic and Photonic Integrated Circuits (EPIC) project is to demonstrate high performance nanophotonic devices in Si fabricated in a CMOS-compatible process, and thus put photonics on its own "Moore's Law" towards the ultimate limit of wavelength-scale devices. This would enable integration of complex electronics and photonics circuits on a single Si chip, eliminating the multiple materials platforms currently used to accomplish such functionality, and provide a seamless interface between photonics and electronics.


  • Luxtera is headquartered in Carlsbad, California.