Professor Graham Reed: The calm before the storm

Silicon photonics luminaries series

Interview 3: Professor Graham Reed

Despite a half-century track record driving technology, electronics is increasingly calling upon optics for help. “It seems to me that this is a marriage that is really going to define the future,” says Graham Reed, professor of silicon photonics at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre.

The optics alongside the electronics does not have to be silicon photonics, he says, but silicon as a photonics technology is attractive for several reasons. 

“What makes silicon photonics interesting is its promise to enable low-cost manufacturing, an important requirement for emerging consumer applications,” says Reed. And being silicon-based, it is much more compatible than other photonics technologies. “It probably means silicon photonics is going to win out,” he says. 

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Start-up Sicoya targets chip-to-chip interfaces

Sicoya has developed a tiny silicon photonics modulator which it is using to design chip-to-chip optical interfaces. The German start-up believes such optical chips - what it calls application-specific photonic integrated circuits or ASPICs - will be needed in the data centre, first for servers and then switches and routers.

“The trend we are seeing is the optics moving very close to the processor,” says Sven Otte, Sicoya’s CEO.

Sicoya was founded last year and raised €3.5 million ($3.9 million) towards the end of 2015. Many of the company’s dozen staff previously worked at the Technical University of Berlin. Sicoya expects to grow the company’s staff to 20 by the year end.  

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Ranovus readies its interfaces for deployment

• Products will be deployed in the first half of 2015
• Ranovus has raised US $24 million in a second funding round
• The start-up is a co-founder of the OpenOptics MSA; Oracle is now also an MSA member.

Ranovus says its interconnect products will be deployed in the first half of 2015. The start-up, which is developing WDM-based interfaces for use in and between data centres, has raised US $24 million in a second stage funding round. The company first raised $11 million in September 2013.

Saeid Aramideh"There is a lot of excitement around technologies being developed for the data centre," says Saeid Aramideh, a Ranovus co-founder and chief marketing and sales officer. He highlights such technologies as switch ICs, software-defined networking (SDN), and components that deliver cost savings and power-consumption reductions. "Definitely, there is a lot of money available if you have the right team and value proposition," says Aramideh. "Not just in Silicon Valley is there interest, but in Canada and the EU."

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