Synopsys Inc. and Juniper Networks are forming a new, separate company that will provide an open silicon photonics platform for applications across the electronics industry.
The new company will include integrated lasers, optical amplifiers and a full suite of photonic components for a complete solution to be offered via a process design kit (PDK). The platform will work in such areas as telecom, datacom, lidar, healthcare, high performance computing, artificial intelligence and optical computing.
The name of the new company will be announced later and will be jointly owned by Synopsys and Juniper.
The company will integrate silicon photonics assets from Juniper, which holds more than 200 patents on photonic device design and process integration. This will be combined with Synopsys’ investment into electronic photonic design automation solution that consists of OptoCompiler, OptSim, PrimeSim, Photonic Device Compiler and IC Validator design software products.
To demonstrate the capabilities of the platform, the new company will create 400G and 800G photonics reference designs with integrated lasers with first samples to be available in the summer.
"This revolutionary technology will change the economics of how people are going to build photonic systems," said Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks. "We have been strong supporters of integrated silicon photonics and we believe the new company will drive development of these systems by using an advanced open platform that will dramatically reduce costs and increase the performance and reliability of designs across multiple use cases."
The companies said adding discrete lasers to silicon photonics has been a challenge due to the cost, which includes the manufacturing as well as the assembly and alignment of those lasers onto the photonic chip.
