Date: 25/01/2012

Luxtera's Silicon CMOS Photonics device solutions open to the OpSIS community

Luxtera is teaming up with the new foundry service for Optoelectronic Systems Integration in Silicon (OpSIS). Under the agreement, Luxtera's Silicon CMOS Photonics device library and process is now open to the OpSIS community, which shares the cost of fabricating complex chip-scale systems across many projects. Luxtera claims it is the industry leader in Silicon Photonics and offers the world's only solution that is in significant volume production. Luxtera has technology to build opto-electronic devices on a silicon based semiconductor chip using the present chip fabrication process. The advantage is data from the processor can be transferred internally on-chip or to the external chip/devices much faster using single optical guide n application ranging from Local Areas Network (LAN) to chip-to-chip interconnect.

Luxtera supports a standard tool flow based on industry leading EDA tools, supporting electronic-photonic co-design with a production proven PDK in subsystem and system level opto-electronic transceiver architectures.

"We are thrilled to be able to offer our community access to Luxtera's unique process. It provides the opportunity to leverage the significant investment and maturation of the world's first production proven CMOS Photonics design flow," said Michael Hochberg, director of OpSIS and associate professor at the University of Delaware. "We believe that this will significantly accelerate the growth of the Silicon Photonics ecosystem. I'm particularly excited that this process will offer both academic and industrial users a chance to leverage a full electronics PDK as well as yield models for the key photonic components in order to accurately predict the performance and yield of complex systems-on-a-chip. I see this as a major step forward for the field as historically much of the innovation has been centered on process development. We're now moving into an era where Silicon Photonics can enable a great deal of innovation at the system and architectural level."

"Luxtera continues to focus its design resources on delivering products to high volume applications for Silicon Photonics. There is significantly more market opportunity than Luxtera can service directly. With OpSIS, smaller projects are now granted access to Luxtera's Silicon Photonics library," said Greg Young, CEO of Luxtera. "In working with OpSIS we are able to advance the wide scale impact of our Silicon Photonic offering as well as push the envelope for future commercialization."

Learn more at http://www.luxtera.com