Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR; Sunnyvale, CA), a provider of automated, scalable, and secure optical networks, has entered into an agreement to acquire Aurrion (Santa Barbara, CA), which has developed a silicon photonics platform that includes the heterogeneous integration of InP materials.
Pradeep Sindhu, founder, vice chairman, and CTO at Juniper, wrote on a company blog, "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."
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Aurrion was co-founded in 2008 by Alexander Fang, the CEO; Gregory Fish is CTO. The chairman and co-founder of Aurrion is John Bowers, a professor at UC Santa Barbara. Milton Chang interviewed Alexander Fang in a May 2014 article for Laser Focus World. It is worth reading to understand the history of the company and importance of silicon photonics:
Business Forum: Integrating photonics with electronics
Also here is an article to help explain the technical issues and opportunities with silicon photonics and one from our sister publication, Lightwave, that shows how Aurrion will fit into the Juniper products and systems:
Silicon photonics evolves to meet real-world requirements (Laser Focus World)
Juniper Networks to buy silicon photonics company Aurrion (Lightwave)
Source: Juniper Networks