With an eye towards better handling bandwidth-ravenous video streaming and data center to data center traffic, Juniper today said it would buy fabless photonics manufacturer Aurrion for an undisclosed price.
“We expect that Aurrion’s breakthrough technology will result in fundamental and permanent improvements in cost per bit-per-second, power per bit-per-second, bandwidth density, and flexibility of networking systems,” said Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and CTO of Juniper Networks wrote in a blog announcing the acquisition.
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“Aurrion has invented breakthrough technology that combines the economies of scale pioneered by the silicon industry with the unique properties of light to carry information over long distances at significantly lower cost. The end result? Dramatically lower cost per bit-per-second for networking systems, higher capacities for networking interfaces, and greater flexibility in how bandwidth carried on light is processed inside the electronic portions of networking systems,” Sindhu wrote.
Industry researchers at MarketsandMarkets recently highlighted the hot silicon photonics arena saying that high-bandwidth applications are driving the need for the technology that could see a compound annual growth rate of over 22% between 2016 and 2022 and a market worth over $1,078.9 million by 2022.
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“Active components include optical modulators, photo detectors, wavelength-division multiplexing filters, switches, and lasers integrated within a single device, providing a smaller form factor with the help of silicon photonics. The advancements in silicon photonics-based networking services would lead the silicon photonics market. The demand for the installation of silicon as an optical medium in photonics device for high-speed data transmission with low cost is growing,” the researchers wrote in a recent report.
The key players in silicon photonics market are Cisco, Intel, IBM Mellanox Technologies, Hamamatsu Photonics K.K., STMicroelectronics N.V., Infinera, Finisar, Luxtera, DAS Photonics, and Aurrion, the researchers stated.