Photonics is a branch of optics that involves the application of generation, detection, and manipulation of light in form of photons through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and sensing. Photonics is closely related to quantum electronics, where quantum electronics deals with the theoretical part of it while photonics deal with its engineering applications. Though covering all light's technical applications over the whole spectrum, most photonic applications are in the range of visible and near-infrared light. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.
Cypress Semiconductor was an American semiconductor design and manufacturing company. It offered NOR flash memories, F-RAM and SRAM Traveo microcontrollers, PSoCs, PMICs, capacitive touch-sensing controllers, Wireless BLE Bluetooth Low-Energy and USB connectivity solutions.
Eli Yablonovitch is an American physicist and engineer who, along with Sajeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987. He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite. In addition to pioneering photonic crystals, he was the first to recognize that a strained quantum-well laser has a significantly reduced threshold current compared to its unstrained counterpart. This is now employed in the majority of semiconductor lasers fabricated throughout the world. His seminal paper reporting inhibited spontaneous emission in photonic crystals is among the most highly cited papers in physics and engineering.
PMC-Sierra was a global fabless semiconductor company with offices worldwide that developed and sold semiconductor devices into the storage, communications, optical networking, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces.
Xilinx, Inc. was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also created the first fabless manufacturing model.
KLA Corporation is an American capital equipment company based in Milpitas, California. It supplies process control and yield management systems for the semiconductor industry and other related nanoelectronics industries. The company's products and services are intended for all phases of wafer, reticle, integrated circuit (IC) and packaging production, from research and development to final volume manufacturing.
Maxim Integrated, a subsidiary of Analog Devices, designs, manufactures, and sells analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits for the automotive, industrial, communications, consumer, and computing markets. Maxim's product portfolio includes power and battery management ICs, sensors, analog ICs, interface ICs, communications solutions, digital ICs, embedded security, and microcontrollers. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, and has design centers, manufacturing facilities, and sales offices worldwide.
RF Micro Devices, was an American company that designed and manufactured high-performance radio frequency systems and solutions for applications that drive wireless and broadband communications. Headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, RFMD traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol RFMD. The Company was founded in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1991. RF Micro had 3500 employees, 1500 of them in Guilford County, North Carolina.
Axel Scherer is the Bernard Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He is also a distinguished visiting professor at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. He is known for fabricating the world's first semiconducting vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) at Bell Labs. In 2006, Scherer was named the director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute. He graduated from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 1985. At Caltech, he teaches a very popular freshman lab course on semiconductor device fabrication, Applied Physics 9ab, for which he wrote the textbook for the course.
A photonic integrated circuit (PIC) or integrated optical circuit is a microchip containing two or more photonic components that form a functioning circuit. This technology detects, generates, transports, and processes light. Photonic integrated circuits utilize photons as opposed to electrons that are utilized by electronic integrated circuits. The major difference between the two is that a photonic integrated circuit provides functions for information signals imposed on optical wavelengths typically in the visible spectrum or near infrared (850–1650 nm).
Silicon photonics is the study and application of photonic systems which use silicon as an optical medium. The silicon is usually patterned with sub-micrometre precision, into microphotonic components. These operate in the infrared, most commonly at the 1.55 micrometre wavelength used by most fiber optic telecommunication systems. The silicon typically lies on top of a layer of silica in what is known as silicon on insulator (SOI).
40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) are groups of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at rates of 40 and 100 gigabits per second (Gbit/s), respectively. These technologies offer significantly higher speeds than 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The technology was first defined by the IEEE 802.3ba-2010 standard and later by the 802.3bg-2011, 802.3bj-2014, 802.3bm-2015, and 802.3cd-2018 standards. The first succeeding Terabit Ethernet specifications were approved in 2017.
Michael Hochberg is an American physicist. He’s authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, has founded several companies, and has been an inventor on over 60 patents. Hochberg's research interests include silicon photonics and large-scale photonic integration. He has worked in a number of application areas, including data communications, biosensing, quantum optics, mid-infrared photonics, optical computing, and machine learning. Much of his work in silicon photonics has been the product of a longstanding series of collaborations with Thomas Baehr-Jones.
MACOM Technology Solutions, Inc. is a developer and producer of radio, microwave, and millimeter wave semiconductor devices and components. The company is headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts, and in 2005 was Lowell's largest private employer. MACOM is certified to the ISO 9001 international quality standard and ISO 14001 environmental standard. The company has design centers and sales offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT), was an American semiconductor company headquartered in San Jose, California. The company designed, manufactured, and marketed low-power, high-performance mixed-signal semiconductor products for the advanced communications, computing, and consumer industries. The company marketed its products primarily to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Founded in 1980, the company began as a provider of complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) for the communications business segment and computing business segments. The company focused on three major areas: communications infrastructure, high-performance computing, and advanced power management. Between 2018 and 2019, IDT was acquired by Renesas Electronics.
Mellanox Technologies Ltd. was an Israeli-American multinational supplier of computer networking products based on InfiniBand and Ethernet technology. Mellanox offered adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon for markets including high-performance computing, data centers, cloud computing, computer data storage and financial services.
Aquantia Corporation was a manufacturer of high-speed transceivers. In 2004, Aquantia Corporation was founded and first made products for Data Center connectivity, and in 2012 developed the world's first integrated 10GBASE-T MAC/PHY for servers. In 2014, Aquantia introduced a new Ethernet technology into the Enterprise Infrastructure market and was joined by Cisco and others in co-founding the NBASE-T Alliance. Their Multi-Gig technology served as the baseline for the 802.3bz standard that was ratified by the IEEE in September 2016. This standard is now the basis for all new Multi-Gig implementations on Cat 5e and Cat 6 cabling in the Enterprise, SMB and SoHo environments.
NeoPhotonics Corporation is an American public corporation based in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1996. The company develops, manufactures and sells optoelectronic products that transmit, receive and switch high speed digital optical signals for communications networks, These products include transceivers, tunable lasers, high bandwidth receivers, optical semiconductors, photonic integrated circuits, and 100 gigabit per second and above modules." These are each "cost-effective components that handle massive amounts of data at very high speeds".
John Michael Dallesasse is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where his research is focused on silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), nanophotonics, semiconductor lasers / transistor lasers and photonics-electronics integration. He has over 60 publications and presentations, and holds 29 issued patents.
Kaiam Corporation was an American manufacturer of optronics equipment for computer networking. Founded in 2009, it was headquartered in Newark, California, and until December 2018 had a manufacturing facility in Silicon Glen in Scotland. After cash-flow problems and a patent infringement lawsuit, the company collapsed in early 2019. The founder and CEO was Bardia Pezeshki.
