IP Communications

Kotura, a provider of silicon photonic components, has announced that Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) has signed a 5-year $14 million development deal with Kotura for DARPA’s Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communications (UNIC) program.

 

Earlier this year, Sun received $44.29 million in funding from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a 5-year research project focused on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by Silicon photonics and proximity communication. This project is part of DARPA's Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication program (UNIC), and is expected to accelerate the development of lower cost, high performance and high productivity systems.

 

Noting that Sun is a global innovator in high performance computing, advanced parallel computing and CPU networking, Jean-Louis Malinge, CEO of Kotura, explained that optical interconnects for CPU-to-CPU connectivity is an important application for both of their companies.

 

Jim Mitchell, vice president, New Technology (News - Alert) Adoption, Sun Microsystems, believes Kotura is well positioned to deliver silicon photonic elements that will contribute directly to Sun's research efforts on this project. With Kotura's silicon photonics technology, Sun is on the verge of radically improving the speed of communications among the chips in powerful computing systems, thereby increasing their performance dramatically. Optical interconnects increase the bandwidth between chips and reduce power consumption and chip-to-chip latency.

 

Kotura already enjoys a great working relationship with Sun and DARPA and is now expanding upon that. Mehdi Asghari, CTO for Kotura, expects their collaboration will expedite the development of multi-layer photonics technology targeting extremely small footprints and ultra low power consumption for HPC (high performance computing) applications. The collaboration aims to develop a range of key building blocks for Optical Interconnect such as interlayer couplers, multi-channel multiplexers and demultiplexers, integrated high speed modulators and detectors.

 

Sun recently announced its participation in DARPA's $44 milliom program to advance a virtual supercomputer using an on-chip network of low-cost optical interconnects.

 

Kotura designs, manufactures and markets a portfolio of application-specific silicon photonics products that are deployed in commercial applications within the fields of communications, computing, sensing, and detection. This year, the company became the first silicon photonics manufacturer to announce ISO 9001:2000 certification. The certificate was reportedly awarded following an independent audit of Kotura’s operations, management and quality systems performed by TUV USA, a member of the TUV Nord Group.