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  • Bell Labs is the research arm of systems vendor Alcatel-Lucent, headquartered in Paris, France. Although the parent company no longer has a components division, it is still exploring integration technologies with medium to long-term potential, including hybrid and monolithic integration, as well as silicon photonics. “This understanding also enables us to better engage vendors in planning product roadmaps and will provide opportunities, through internal or co-operative development, to more quickly evolve our own products,” said technical staff member Doug Gill. Bell Labs detailed its work on a silicon tunable thermo-optic filter/equalizer at OFC 2007, and has also been investigating resonant electro-optic modulation. www.bell-labs.com
  • Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, California, announced its entry into the silicon photonics fray in May 2008. Using optics to connect blades, boards, chips and eventually cores on the same chip has become a strategic goal for the company, which hopes to show product demonstrations within the year. HP Labs has demonstrated a tiny ring resonator in silicon that it plans to make using nanoimprint lithography — a process that can be used to stamp features as small as 15 nm onto silicon. The company also says it expects to partner with other companies to achieve its goals. www.hpl.hp.com
  • Intel, California, US. Although Intel sold its Optical Platform Division, which made telecoms and datacoms transceivers, to Emcore in 2008, the silicon photonics R&D was never part of that group, and remains a core focus for the company. The company plans to integrate optics and electronics in a hybrid fashion, at the package level, to create optical interconnects on and between chips. Intel's research is looking at optical-only silicon chips, which it believes will allow more flexibility to develop very-high-performance optical devices. www.intel.com/go/sp/
  • US vendor IBM's interest in silicon photonics started out as blue skies research on topics such as photonic crystals, and slow light, but over the last few years the research has become more closely targeted towards the development of on-chip optical interconnects for future multi-core processors. In 2007 the company showed a 10Gbit/s optical modulator in silicon, and last year it demonstrated a high-throughput nanophotonic switch based on cascaded micro-ring resonators. IBM has also developed low-loss polymer waveguides on printed circuit boards. www.research.ibm.com/photonics/
  • Kotura, Monterey Park, California, US. Kotura arose phoenix like from the ashes of failed startups Arroyo Optics and Lightcross in 2004. The company wants to be an "optical ASIC" company, enabling vendors to design custom silicon-based components from a library of parts. It's also worth noting that in Bookham founder Andrew Rickman is a member of the board. Like Bookham, Kotura's first product is a silicon VOA. The company has joined forces with CyOptics on a project to put a terabit of capacity onto a silicon chip. www.kotura.com
  • Lightwire, Allentown, Pennsylvania, US. Although this start-up only emerged from stealth mode at OFC 2008, it has a long history. Founder Kal Shastri started work on silicon photonics in 2001. His company OptronX was sold to JDS Uniphase in 2003, but the silicon photonics intellectual property was retained for Shastri to transfer to his next start-up, SiOptical, which changed its name to Lightwire in 2007. The first product, already shipping, is a 10 Gbit/s SFP+ transceiver. The roadmap points towards solutions with 40 and 100 Gbit/s aggregate bandwidths delivered from a single laser. www.lightwire.com
  • Luxtera, Carlsbad, California, US, is a spin-out from the California Institute of Technology. The company claims to have produced the first 10 Gbit/s optical modulator in CMOS in 2005, and launched its first products in 2008 — 40 Gbit/s active optical cables for the data centre. Luxtera appears to be well funded, and raised $26.75 million in funding in the fourth quarter of 2008. www.luxtera.com
  • Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara, California, US. In March 2008, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded Sun a five-and-a-half year $44.3 million (€34.6 million) contract to research and develop commercially viable optical interconnects for next generation multiprocessor systems. For the contract, Sun will be partnering with Luxtera and Kotura, as well as Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego. work.research.sun.com/minds/2008-0603/