By invitation: Professor Roel Baets on Silicon Photonics 4.0
Roel Baets, Emeritus Professor at Ghent University and former Group Leader at imec gave a plenary talk on ‘Silicon Photonics 4.0’ at the recent ECOC conference. “It will be important for silicon photonics to make use of smart and agile manufacturing, a notion associated with Industry 4.0,” said Professor Baets, explaining the title.
In a guest piece, he explains his thoughts and discusses what he saw at ECOC. He also has a request.
One of the things I discussed in my ECOC plenary talk was the large gap between research and product development for new applications of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) on the one hand, and product sales and new industrial process flows on the other.
Among many reasons for this gap, one stands out: the major barriers that fabless start-ups face when developing a product based on a still immature industrial supply chain.
This often implies that part of the start-up’s non-recurring engineering (NRE) budget needs to be spent on co-investment in a new process flow by a technology provider, which can easily be too expensive for a start-up. The growing diversity in materials added to silicon photonics process flows to meet the needs of new applications is a major compounding factor in this context.
I showed a slide that listed the companies that I am aware of that sell non-transceiver products based on PICs (silicon or other). I try to keep this list up to date with my Ghent University colleague, Prof. Wim Bogaerts, chair of ePIXfab. The slide showed only seven companies, while there are probably between 100 and 200 companies around the world that develop such products.
These companies are Genalyte (biosensors for diagnostics), Anello (optical gyroscope), Sentea and PhotonFirst (fibre Bragg grating readout), Quix (quantum processor), Thorlabs (>100GHz opto-electronic converter) and iPronics (originally a programmable photonic processor company now focussing on optical switching). These companies will likely sell only in modest numbers, but at least they sell a product.
After my talk, I eagerly went to the ECOC exhibition in the hope of spotting additional companies. I found two that I could add to the list: Chilas (tunable low-linewidth lasers) and SuperLight Photonics (supercontinuum lasers).
A few weeks later, I discovered yet another fledgling company ready to sell: hQphotonics (ultra-low-noise microwave oscillators). So the list is double-digit now! Perhaps this is an important milestone towards Silicon Photonics 4.0.
Interestingly, four of those ten companies use Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology, four use silicon nitride PICs, one uses InP, and one uses thin-film Lithium Niobate (TFLN).
Undoubtedly, the list is incomplete. There may be other companies with a product (not just a prototype or a demo kit or a technology service) that we do not know.
So let me make a call to contact me if you know of any company not on the list of ten that sells a non-transceiver product based on PICs.
roel.baets@ugent.be
Lumentum jolts the industry with Oclaro acquisition
Lumentum announced on Monday its plan to acquire Oclaro in a deal worth $1.8 billion.
The prospect of consolidation among optical component players has long been mooted yet the announcement provided the first big news jolt at the OFC show, being held in San Diego this week.
Alan Lowe“Combined, we will be an industry leader in telecom transmission and transport as well as 3D sensing,” said Alan Lowe, president and CEO of Lumentum, on an analyst call discussing the deal.
Lumentum says their joint revenues totalled $1.7 billion with a 39% gross margin over the last year. And $60 million in synergies are forecast in the second year after the deal closes, which is expected to happen later this year.
The $1.8 billion acquisition will comprise 56 percent cash and 44 percent Lumentum stock. Lumentum will also raise $550 million to help finance the deal.
“This is a big deal as it consolidates the telecom part of the component market,” says Daryl Inniss, business development manager at OFS Fitel and former market research analyst.
Background
Lowe said that ever since Lumentum became a standalone company three years ago, the firm concentrated on addressing the increase in optical communications demand that started in late 2015 and then last year on ramping the production of its 3D sensing components. “Execution on major M&As had to wait,” he said.
The company investigated potential acquisitions and evaluated several key technologies including silicon photonics and indium phosphide. This led to it alighting on Oclaro with its indium phosphide and photonic integrated circuit (PIC) expertise.
Lowe also highlighted Oclaro’s strategy of the last five years of first trimming its business lines and then successfully executing on delivering optical transmission products.
Oclaro’s CEO, Greg Dougherty, CEO of Oclaro, described how his company has focussed on delivering differentiated photonic chip products to various growing end markets. “This is a very good combination for both companies and for the industry,” said Dougherty.
There is no overabundance in [optical] chip designers worldwide and together we have the strongest chip designer team in the world
Business plans
Lumentum’s business includes telecom transport components, modules and sub-systems. Its products include reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), pump lasers, optical amplifiers and submarine products. In the second half of 2017, Lumentum’s telecom revenue mix was split three quarters telecom transport with transmission products accounted for the remaining quarter. Other Lumentum businesses include industrial lasers and 3D sensing.
In contrast, Oclaro’s focus in solely transmission components and modules, with the revenue mix in its most recent quarter being 53 percent telecom line side and 47 percent datacom client-side products.
The combined R&D resources of the merged company will allow it to do a much better job at supporting datacom products using the new QSFP-DD and OSFP form factors. “Right now I’m guessing that Alan is spread thin and I know the Oclaro datacom team has been spread thin,” says Dougherty.
The acquisition will also pool the two companies’ fabrication facilities.
Lumentum has already moved its lithium niobate manufacturing to its main gallium arsenide and indium phosphide fab in San Jose, California. San Jose also hosts a separate planar lightwave circuit fab.
Oclaro, which is headquartered in San Jose, has three photonic chip fabrication sites: an indium phosphide laser fab for datacom in Japan that makes directly modulated lasers (DMLs) and electro-absorption modulated lasers (EMLs), an indium phosphide fab in the UK that manufactures coherent optical components and sub-assemblies, and a lithium niobate fab in Italy.
The acquisition will also bolster the company’s chip design resources. “There is no overabundance in [optical] chip designers worldwide and together we have the strongest chip designer team in the world,” says Dougherty.
Lumentum plans to assign some of the chip designers to tackle a burgeoning pipeline of 3D sensing product designs.
In 2017 Lumentum reported three customers that accounted for nearly half of its revenues, while Oclaro had four customers, each accounted for 10 percent or more of its sales, in 4Q 2017. Oclaro selected customers include the webscale players, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as leading systems vendors such as Ciena, Cisco, Coriant, Huawei, Juniper, Nokia and ZTE.
Both Oclaro and Lumentum, along with Neophotonics, signed an agreement with Ciena a year ago to use its WaveLogic Ai DSP in their coherent module designs.
Lumentum plans to provide more deal details closer to its closure. Meanwhile, the two CEOs will continue to run their companies with Oclaro’s Dougherty remaining at least during the transition period.
Further information:
For the link to the acquisition presentation, click here.
Elenion unveiled as a silicon photonics PIC company
- Elenion Technologies is making silicon photonics-based photonic integrated circuits
- The company has been active for two and a half years and has products already deployed
A privately-owned silicon photonics company that is already shipping products has dropped its state of secrecy to announce itself. Elenion Technologies is owned by Marlin Equity Partners, the investment firm that also owns systems vendor, Coriant.
“We are in the [optical] engine business,” says Larry Schwerin, CEO of Elenion Technologies. “We are developing a platform leveraging silicon photonics but we have other capabilities.”
Larry SchwerinElenion’s expertise includes indium phosphide, radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), packaging, and driver and control electronics circuit design. The RFIC expertise suggests the company also plans to address the mobility market.
The company will detail its first products prior to the OFC show next March.
Telecom and Datacom
Elenion’s initial focus is the telecom market where its products are already deployed, with Coriant being a likely early customer. “We are also very active in datacom which has a different set of requirements,” says Schwerin.
Telecom is the harder 'trade space' of the two segments, says Schwerin. Telecom designs have to be outside-plant hardened and Telcordia-compliant. “Proving that world is a good place to get started and focussed,” he says.
In contrast, the datacom market has shorter equipment life cycles with optical designs deployed in a more controlled environment. Datacom customers also don't just want pluggables. “They want on-board solutions, parallel solutions, and they request a cost of $1-per-gigabit,” says Schwerin.
The company is targeting optical module makers, systems vendors and the cloud operators
The challenges facing the large-scale data centre operators are multifold: how they drive more bandwidth to the server, how they make the server more effective, how they scale their switching fabric, how they better use their fibre infrastructure and how they meet their optics cost targets.
Elenion says it has detailed data on the construction and costs of data centres and how they will scale. "You need to have that expertise in order to design the platform that they are trying to do today and going forward," says Schwerin. The company is working to deliver an optical engine that will help the data centre operators address the issues of distance, power consumption, space and signal integrity, and which will meet their $1-per-gigabit cost target.
We have developed a set of tools and a set of expertise that lets us design very complex integrated optoelectronic systems at the chip scale
Expertise
Elenion is limited in what it can say until its first products are unveiled. What is clear is that the silicon photonics company has a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) capability that it is using for on-board optics and for pluggable designs such as the CFP2.
Michael Hochberg
“We have developed a set of tools and a set of expertise that lets us design very complex integrated opto-electronic systems at the chip scale,” says Michael Hochberg, CTO of Elenion.
According to Hochberg, Elenion is pulling complexity out of other systems and putting it into silicon. The value of such PICs is that it avoids having to deploy discrete optics such as lenses. And silicon is the ideal platform for scaling complexity, says Hochberg: “All the areas that we have developed expertise are things that we believe will need to be co-designed with the PIC.”
In the electronics industry, you tape things out and you expect them to work. That is what we are replicating here.
The company says it is building up a capability that has long existed in the semiconductor industry. "In the electronics industry, you tape things out and you expect them to work," says Hochberg. "That is what we are replicating here."
For datacom applications, Schwerin says that in addition to the PIC’s function, the company has developed a wafer-scale approach to packaging. Here, devices are packaged while still on the wafer rather than having to dice the wafer first. “You have got to get into the volumes of millions, not tens or hundreds of thousands,” says Schwerin. “That forces you into that space.”
The company is targeting optical module makers, systems vendors and the cloud operators as customers.
Origins
Schwerin was formerly the CEO of Capella Intelligent Subsystems, a developer of wavelength-selective switch technology, that was sold to Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) in 2013.
Hochberg was a director at the Optoelectronic Systems in Silicon (OpSIS) foundry and was a co-founder of silicon photonics company, Luxtera.
The two first met at a conference when Hochberg was running Silicon Lightwave Services (SLS), a silicon photonics design-for-service company. Schwerin became CEO of SLS and the company was bought by Merlin two and a half years ago to become Elenion. The name Elenion means starlight, a nod to J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels.
“We are now introducing ourselves as we are getting enough requests that it seemed the appropriate time,” says Schwerin.
US invests $610 million to spur integrated photonics
Prof. Duncan Moore
Dubbed the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics), the venture has attracted 124 partners includes 20 universities and over 50 companies.
The manufacturing innovation institute will be based in Rochester, New York, and will be led by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York. A key goal is that the manufacturing institute will continue after the initiative is completed in early 2021.
We are at the point in photonics where we were in electronics when we still had transistors, resistors and capacitors. What we are trying to do now is the equivalent of the electronics IC
While the focus is on photonic integrated circuits, the expectation is that the venture will end up being broader. “NASA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense are all interested in using this as a vehicle for doing other work,” says Duncan Moore, professor of optics at the University of Rochester.
The venture will address such issues as design, on-chip manufacturing, packaging and assembly of PICs. “We are at the point in photonics where we were in electronics when we still had transistors, resistors and capacitors,” says Moore. “What we are trying to do now is the equivalent of the electronics IC.”
"It is an amazing public-private consortium utilizing an unprecedented $610 million investment in photonics," says Richard Soref, a silicon photonics pioneer and a Group IV photonics researcher. "The large and powerful team of world-class investigators is likely to make research-and-development progress of great importance for the US and the world.”
Project plans
The first six months are being used to fill in project’s details. “There are overall budget numbers but individual projects are not well defined in the proposal,” says Moore, adding that many of the subfields - packaging, sensors and the like - will be defined and request-for-proposals issued.
An executive committee will then determine which projects are funded and to what degree. Project durations will vary from one-offs to the full five years.
The large and powerful team of world-class investigators is likely to make research-and-development progress of great importance for the US and the world
Companies backing the project include indium phosphide specialist Infinera as well as silicon photonics players Acacia Communications, Aurrion, and Intel. How the two technologies as well as Group IV photonics will be accommodated as part of the manufacturing base is still to be determined, says Prof. Moore. His expectation is that all will be investigated before a ‘shakeout’ will occur as the venture progresses.
The focus will be on telecom wavelengths and the mid-wave 3 to 5 micron band. “There are a lot of applications in that [longer] wavelength band: remote sensing, environmental analysis, and for doing things on the battlefield,” says Moore.
A public document will be issued around the year-end describing the project’s organisation.
Further information:
The White House factsheet, click here
A Photonics video interview with the chairman of the institute, Professor Robert Clark, click here
