Mellanox to acquire silicon photonics player Kotura

Source: Gazettabyte

Mellanox Technologies has announced its intention to acquire silicon photonics player, Kotura, for $82 million.

The acquisition will enable Mellanox to deliver 100 Gigabit Infiniband and Ethernet interconnect in the coming two years. lt will also provide Kotura with the resources needed to bring its 100 Gigabit QSFP to market. Mellanox will also gain Kotura's optical engine for use in active optical cables and new mid-plane platform designs, as well as future higher speed interfaces.    

The news is also significant for the optical component industry. Kotura is one of the three established merchant silicon photonics players - the others being LightWire and Luxtera - that have spent years developing their technologies.

LightWire was acquired by Cisco Systems in March 2012 for US $271 million and now Mellanox plans to acquire Kotura. The two equipment vendors recognise the value of the technology, bringing it in-house to reduce system interconnect costs and as a long term differentiator for their equipment and ASIC designs. Mellanox, as a silicon photonics player, will compete with Intel, with its own silicon photonics technology, and Cisco Systems. 

Kotura has been using its technology to sell telecom products such as variable optical attenuators and multiplexers. The start-up recently announced its 100 Gig QSFP that uses wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmitter and receiver chips. The product is to become available in 2014.

In an interview last year, Kotura's CTO, Mehdi Asghari, discussed a roadmap showing how its 100 Gigabit silicon photonics technology could scale to 400 Gigabit and eventually 1.6 Terabit.

"Our devices are capable of running at 40 or 50 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps), depending on the electronics. The electronics is going to limit the speed of our devices. We can very easily see going from four channels at 25Gbps to 16 channels at 25Gbps to provide a 400 Gigabit solution," Asghari told Gazettabyte.

Kotura also discussed how the line rate could be increased to 50Gbps either using a non-return-to-zero (NRZ) line rate or using a multi-level modulation such as pulse amplitude modulation (PAM).

"To get to 1.6 Terabit transceivers, we envisage something running at 40Gbps times 40 channels or 50Gbps times 32 channels. We already have done a single receiver chip demonstrator that has 40 channels, each at 40Gbps," said Asghari.

"These things in silicon are not a big deal. The III-V guys really struggle with yield and cost. But you can envisage scaling to that level of complexity in a silicon platform."

Silicon photonics will not replace existing VCSEL or indium phosphide-based transceiver designs. But there is no doubting silicon photonics is emerging as a key optical technology and the segment is heating up.

If the early start-ups are being acquired, there have been more recent silicon photonics players entering the marketplace such as Aurrion, Skorpios Technologies and Teraxion. There are also internal developments among equipment players such as Alcatel-Lucent, HP Labs and IBM. Indeed Kotura has worked closely with Oracle (Sun Microsystems)

Further acquisitions of silicon photonic players should be expected as companies start designing next generation, denser systems and adopt 100 Gigabit and faster interfaces.

Equally, established optical component and module companies will likely enter quietly (and not so quietly) the marketplace adding silicon photonics to their technology toolkits when the timing is right.

Trends to watch

Two industry trends are underway regarding silicon photonics.

The first is system vendors wanting to own the technology to reduce their costs while recognising a need to control and understand the technology as they tackle more complex equipment designs.

The other, what at first glance is a contrarian trend, is the democratisation of silicon photonics.

The technology is slowly passing from the select few to become more generally available for industry use. For this to happen, the relevant design tools need to mature as do third-party fabrication plants that will manufacture the silicon photonics designs.

Appendix: 

On June 4th, 2013, Mellanox announced a definitive agreement to acquire chip company IPtronics for $47.5 million as it builds out its in-house technologies for optical interconnect. Click here

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Avago to acquire CyOptics, click here