Ayar Labs advances I/O and pens GlobalFoundries deal

Silicon photonics start-up, Ayar Labs, has entered into a strategic agreement with semiconductor foundry, GlobalFoundries.

Alexandra Wright-GladsteinAyar Labs will provide GlobalFoundries with its optical input-output (I/O) technology. In return, the start-up will gain early access to the foundry’s 45nm CMOS process being tailored for silicon photonics.

GlobalFoundries has also made an investment in the start-up for an undisclosed fee.

“We gain, first and foremost, a close relationship with GlobalFoundries as we qualify our product for customers,” says Alexandra Wright-Gladstein, co-founder and CEO of Ayar Labs. “That will help us speed up availability of our product and have their weight of support behind us.”

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Reflections on OFC 2017

Mood, technologies, notable announcements - just what are the metrics to judge the OFC 2017 show held in Los Angeles last week?

It was the first show I had attended in several years and the most obvious changes were how natural the presence of the internet content providers now is alongside the telecom operators, as well as systems vendors exhibiting at the show. Chip companies, while also present, were fewer than before.

Source: OSA

Another impression were the latest buzz terms: 5G, the Internet of Things and virtual reality-augmented reality. Certain of these technologies are more concrete than others, but their repeated mention suggests a consensus that the topics are real enough to impact optical components and networking.

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Silicon photonics adds off-chip comms to a RISC-V processor

A group of researchers have developed a microprocessor that uses silicon photonics-based optics to send and receive data.

"For the first time a system - a microprocessor - has been able to communicate with the external world using something other than electronics," says Vladimir Stojanovic, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Vladimir Stojanovic

The microprocessor is the result of work that started at MIT nearly a decade ago as part of a project sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate the integration of photonics and electronics for off-chip and even intra-chip communications.  

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