OpenLight's CEO on its silicon photonics strategy

Adam Carter, recently appointed the CEO of OpenLight, discusses the company’s strategy and the market opportunities for silicon photonics.

Adam Carter, CEO of OpenLight

Adam Carter’s path to becoming OpenLight’s first CEO is a circuitous one.

OpenLight, a start-up, offers the marketplace an open silicon photonics platform with integrated lasers and gain blocks.

Having worked at Cisco and Oclaro, which was acquired by Lumentum in 2018, Carter decided to take six months off. Covid then hit, prolonging his time out.

Carter returned as a consultant working with firms, including a venture capitalist (VC). The VC alerted him about OpenLight’s search for a CEO.

Carter’s interest in OpenLight was immediate. He already knew the technology and OpenLight’s engineering team and recognised the platform’s market potential.

“If it works in the way I think it can work, it [the platform] could be very interesting for many companies who don't have access to the [silicon photonics] technology,” says Carter.

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OpenLight's integrated-laser silicon photonics platform

• OpenLight is an independent silicon photonics company backed by Synopsys and Juniper Networks 
• The company was created by carving out the silicon photonics arm of Juniper
• The establishment of OpenLight and its open platform highlights the growing maturity of silicon photonics as new applications emerge beyond datacom and telecom

Thomas Mader, OpenLight

OpenLight is coming to market with an open silicon photonics platform that includes integrated lasers and gain blocks.

Juniper has a long relationship with Synopsys, using its electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) tools.

So when Juniper said it was spinning out its silicon photonics group, Synopsys was keen to partner.

The result is OpenLight, of which Synopsys has a 75 per cent stake costing $67.5 million.

Thomas Mader, OpenLight's chief operating officer and formerly head of Juniper's silicon photonics unit, says OpenLight is the first company to offer an open platform that includes monolithically integrated lasers, optical amplifiers and modulators. 

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Heterogeneous integration comes of age

Silicon photonics luminaries series

Interview 7: Professor John Bowers

August has been a notable month for John Bowers.

Juniper Networks announced its intention to acquire Aurrion, the US silicon photonics start-up that Bowers co-founded with Alexander Fang. And Intel, a company Bowers worked with on a hybrid integration laser-bonding technique, unveiled its first 100-gigabit silicon photonics transceivers.

Professor John BowersBower, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), first started working in photonics in 1981 while at AT&T Bell Labs.

When he became interested in silicon photonics, it still lacked a good modulator and laser. "If you don't have a laser and a modulator, or a directly modulated laser, it is not a very interesting chip,” says Bowers. "So I started thinking how to do that."

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Intel's 100-gigabit silicon photonics move

Intel has unveiled two 100-gigabit optical modules for the data centre made using silicon photonics technology.

Alexis Bjorlin

The PSM4 and CWDM4/CLR4 100-gigabit modules mark the first commercial application of a hybrid integration technique for silicon photonics, dubbed heterogeneous integration, that Intel has been developing for years.

Intel's 100-gigabit module announcement follows the news that Juniper Networks has entered into an agreement to acquire start-up, Aurrion, for $165 million. Aurrion is another silicon photonics player developing this hybrid integration technology for its products. 

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Juniper Networks to acquire Aurrion for $165 million

The announcement of the acquisition was low key. A CTO blog post and a statement that Juniper Networks had entered into an agreement to acquire Aurrion, the fabless silicon photonics start-up. No fee was mentioned.

However, in the company's US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Juniper values the deal at approximately $165 million. "The Company believes the acquisition will help to fuel its long-term competitive advantage by enabling cost-effective, high-density, high-speed optical networks," it said. The deal is expected to be closed this quarter.

Source: Gazettabyte

At first glance, Juniper is simply the latest in a series of systems vendors bringing silicon photonics in-house. Silicon photonics is a technology that allows photonic devices to be made on a silicon substrate, fabricated in a CMOS facility.

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Aurrion mixes datacom and telecom lasers on a wafer

Silicon photonics player, Aurrion, has detailed the making of multiple laser designs for datacom and telecom on a single wafer. The multiple designs on one wafer benefit the economics of telecom lasers by manufacturing them alongside higher-volume datacom sources.

"There is an inevitability of the co-mingling of electronics and optics and we are just at the beginning"

Eric Hall, Aurrion

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