Aurrion, Inc., a world leader in silicon photonics and pioneer in photonic heterogeneous integration, will present a recent breakthrough demonstration of lasers, for both telecom and datacom applications, monolithically integrated with silicon photonic circuits on March 21, 2013 as part of the post deadline session at the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) Conference in Anaheim, California. Although silicon photonics has long promised to simultaneously bring orders of magnitude improvements in complexity and cost to the fabrication of optical circuits for telecom and datacom markets, the absence of high performance light sources has slowed its adoption.

Aurrion, however, has demonstrated two essential laser technologies to address this silicon photonic technology gap: 1) narrow-linewidth, widely-tunable 1550nm lasers for 100Gbps long-haul and metro telecom links, and 2) uncooled 1310nm WDM laser arrays for 100Gbps and 400Gbps datacenter and high performance computing (HPC) interconnects. Both laser technologies were fabricated simultaneously on the same silicon wafer using established commercial foundry infrastructure and the heterogeneous integration platform developed by Aurrion. “Aurrion’s heterogeneously integrated silicon photonics platform enables a whole new class of capability by integrating lasers with silicon photonics and intimately combining best-in-class electronics through co-packaging,” said Dr. Gregory Fish, Aurrion’s CTO.

Aurrion’s demonstration of high performance lasers integrated on a silicon photonic platform is the final piece of the silicon photonic puzzle, enabling all photonic functions to be integrated on a single chip with semiconductor processes capable of high precision and manufacturing volume. With this development, the realization of a cost-effective optical interconnect technology which can scale with the exploding bandwidth requirements of telecommunications and datacenter interconnects, is now in sight. Karen Liu, Principal Analyst of Components, Ovum Inc., said, “The industry is really pressed for bandwidth, density and cost and as a result WDM is needed both in long haul and datacenters. Silicon photonics promises lower cost and more importantly a path forward for these challenges.”

Dr. Brian Koch from Aurrion will present the paper.

About Aurrion

Aurrion is a rapidly growing company based in Goleta, California. Aurrion’s platform enables all the elements of photonics systems, including active components such as lasers, modulators and amplifiers, to be fabricated on the wafer scale with the performance of traditional III-V materials and the control and cost-structure of silicon foundries. Aurrion is working with system integrators to produce the next generation of photonic systems that leverage the size, cost and power savings that are enabled by this platform.