Juniper Networks acquires photonics start-up Aurrion
Juniper Networks, a US optical network company, has entered into an agreement to acquire Aurrion, a Santa Barbara-based start-up that has developed a silicon photonics platform that includes the heterogeneous integration of InP materials.
As Juniper founder Pradeep Sindhu explains in a blog, the optoelectronics that converts electricity to light and vice-versa has historically represented significantly less than half the cost of a networking system, especially for optoelectronics designed for short to medium distances. "Today, we see that things have completely reversed: the optoelectronics portion now represents significantly more than half the cost," he said.
"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.
"If we couple this new technology with Juniper's history of bringing innovative networking products to market, we believe we can make significant improvements to the foundations of all of our networking products within a relatively short time," he added.
