Date: 12/03/2012

Silcon photonics partnership between Luxtera and STMicroelectronics

STMicroelectronics and Luxtera Inc have announced a new agreement to use Luxtera's silicon photonics technology in a dedicated process to be developed by ST at its 300mm facility in Crolles, France. The partnership is aimed at delivering low cost silicon based high speed chips rather than expensive compound semiconductor based communication chips for optical networking, CPU interconnect, and data storage, as they scale to multi-terabit connectivity.

"The powerful synergy of this partnership, derived from the complementary strengths of two technology and industry leaders, represents a tremendous breakthrough. This will bring silicon photonics into the mainstream of important technologies such as optical networking, ultra-fast computer processors and other applications via the commercial volume availability of a best-in-class silicon photonics IP platform," said Flavio Benetti, general manager of mixed process division at STMicroelectronics.

ST agreed to provide Luxtera with a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective supply chain, allowing Luxtera to satisfy its growing market in terms of volume and quality requirements.

"Luxtera has found a broad market opportunity for silicon photonics that requires an expanded supply chain and continued technology advancement. We can now offer our customers a high-volume, capable source of supply and an aggressive long-term photonic process technology roadmap. This will advance our base technology and enable the integration of optical transceivers with SoCs from advanced CMOS nodes to deliver photonic-enabled SoCs for large scale systems. In turn, ST can now offer customers the world's leading optical IP as the two companies expand the silicon photonics ecosystem," said Greg Young, president and CEO of Luxtera.

The new advanced 300mm silicon photonics platform being developed by ST will offer these key benefits as per ST:
Performance: Scalability of low-cost transceivers for data rates of 100Gb, 400Gb and upwards;
Density: Ultra-high-density interconnect with the lowest power consumption;
Interoperability: with support for 1310nm, 1490nm and 1550nm wavelengths.