Member News: Kotura Awarded $14M Silicon Photonics Contract

September 3, 2008

 

Kotura Awarded $14M Silicon Photonics Contract with Sun Microsystems and DARPA

 

Monterey Park, Calif., September 3rd, 2008 - Kotura, Inc., a leading provider of silicon photonic components, today announced that Sun Microsystems has signed a five year $14M development contract with Kotura for DARPA’s Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communications (UNIC) program. Previously, Sun announced its participation in DARPA's $44M program to advance a virtual supercomputer using an on-chip network of low-cost optical interconnects.

"Sun is a global leader in high performance computing, advanced parallel computing and CPU networking," said Jean-Louis Malinge, CEO of Kotura. "Optical interconnects for CPU-to-CPU connectivity is an important application for both of our companies. We are delighted that Sun has selected Kotura for the UNIC program."

"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, we are on the verge of radically improving the speed of communications among the chips in powerful computing systems, thereby increasing their performance dramatically" said Jim Mitchell, Vice President, New Technology Adoption, Sun Microsystems. "Optical interconnects increase the bandwidth between chips while reducing power consumption and chip-to-chip latency."

"We have a great working relationship with Sun and DARPA and are now expanding upon that," added Mehdi Asghari, CTO for Kotura. "Our collaboration will speed up the development of multi-layer photonics technology targeting extremely small footprints and ultra low power consumption for HPC (high performance computing) applications. Under this work we will 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."

 

About Kotura, Inc.

Kotura, Inc., a worldwide leader in silicon photonics 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. The company achieved ISO 9001:2000 certification in April 2008 and has been in mass production of silicon photonics components for more than three years. Kotura is an active participant in the IEEE 802.3 Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG), the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) and the Silicon Photonics Alliance, the first formal Community of Interest with the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA). For more information, please visit the company’s web site at http://www.kotura.com.

 

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- “The Network is the Computer” -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.