| Luxtera Inc. | |
| Type: | Subsidiary of Cisco Systems |
| Founder: | Axel Scherer Michael Hochberg Tom Baehr-Jones Eli Yablonovitch |
| Location: | Carlsbad, California |
| Industry: | Semiconductors |
| Products: | Blazar |
| Parent: | Cisco Systems |
Luxtera Inc., a subsidiary of Cisco Systems, is a semiconductor company that uses silicon photonics technology to build complex electro-optical systems in a production silicon CMOS process.[1]
The company uses fabless manufacturing; it uses semiconductor fabrication plants of Freescale Semiconductor.
The company received $130 million in funding and was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2019 for $660 million.[2]
The company was founded in 2001 by a group of professors and students at California Institute of Technology including Axel Scherer, Michael Hochberg, Tom Baehr-Jones, Eli Yablonovitch, Alex Dickinson and Lawrence C Gunn.[3]
In 2006, the company received a $5 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.[4]
In August 2007, the company introduced Blazar, a 40GB optical active cable for interconnect within high performance computer clusters using single-mode optical fiber.[5]
In 2010, Luxtera was selected as one of MIT Technology Review's 50 Most Innovative Companies.[6]
In February 2019, Cisco Systems acquired the company.[7]
Luxtera sold embedded optical transceiver that were aimed at use in data centers, within telecom networks or companies, with the last transceiver using the QSFP 100G PSM4 specification.[8] [9] The company's cables used silicon photonics technology to send photonic data from their cables directly to semiconductors without first converting the data into electrical signals.