Teramount’s scalable fibre-attach for co-packaged optics

Part 2: Co-packaged optics: fibre-attach

Hesham Taha recently returned from a trip to the US to meet with leading vendors and players serving the silicon photonics industry.

“It is important to continue probing the industry,” says Taha, the CEO of start-up Teramount.

Teramount specialises in fibre assembly technology: coupling fibre to silicon photonics chips.

Taha is now back in the US, this time to unveil Teramount’s latest product at this week’s OFC show being held in San Diego. The company is detailing a new version of its fibre assembly technology, dubbed Teraverse-XD, that doubles the density of fibres connected to a silicon photonics chip.

Teramount is also announcing it is working with GlobalFoundries, a leading silicon-photonics foundry.

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ECOC 2023 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent ECOC show in Glasgow. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are the first responses from BT, Huawei, and Teramount. 

Andrew Lord, Senior Manager, Optical Networks and Quantum Research at BT

I was hugely privileged to be the Technical Co-Chair of ECOC in Glasgow, Scotland and have been working on the event for over a year. The overriding impression was that the industry is fully functioning again, post-covid, with a bumper crop of submitted papers and a full exhibition. Chairing the conference left little time to indulge in content. I will need to do my regular ECOC using the playback option. But specific themes struck me as interesting.

There were solid sessions and papers around free space optics, including satellite. The activities here are more intense than we would typically see at ECOC. This reflects a growing interest and the specific expertise within the Scottish research community. Similarly, more quantum-related papers demonstrated how quantum is integrating into the mainstream optical industry.

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Teramount brings pluggability to co-packaged optics

Hesham Taha, the CEO and co-founder of Teramount, describes the last two years for his company as eventful.

"Many things have happened on many fronts," he says.

Teramount has developed a fibre assembly technology for designs integrating photonics and chips.

Hesham Taha

The start-up has raised $20 million in funding and has 30 staff. In addition, the company is recruiting staff experienced in manufacturing processes.

"The funding helps to support what we are working on today, which is manufacturing readiness," says Taha.

Taha also notes marketplace changes as when the rising interest in co-packaged caused some companies that had stepped out of silicon photonics to return.

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Packaging silicon photonics using passive alignment

• An Israeli start-up is tackling a key packaging challenge for silicon photonics

Teramount has developed a way to simplify the packaging of silicon photonics chips. Instead of using active alignment whereby an external laser is required to carefully align a fibre to the optical die, the Israeli start-up has developed a technology that allows passive alignment.  

Hesham Taha“If we want silicon photonics to ramp up to volume, it has to meet CMOS standards both in terms of fabrication and packaging,” says Hesham Taha, Teramount's CEO.

Taha worked at a company developing atomic force microscopy systems before co-founding Teramount. "We got to know of the problem of injecting light into a waveguide and were surprised that the industry was still using active alignment," he says.

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