Aurrion, Inc., founded in 2008, was an optoelectronics company that specialized in integrating photonic and electronic components into silicon chips. Aurrion was founded by UCSB alum Alexander Fang and UCSB Professor John Bowers from the Engineering and Materials Department. Gregory Fish, a UCSB alum and co-founder of another successful UCSB startup, Agility Communications, joined Aurrion in 2009 to become CTO.
Traditional optical transceivers resemble a transistor radio, formed from many discrete optical components. Aurrion’s silicon photonics technology allowed optical transceivers to be built with the optical components in a single integrated chip. These chips were manufactured in existing facilities, keeping the costs low. High performance was maintained by the heterogeneous integration of InP materials, resulting in advanced photonic networks capable of current industry performance needs at mega data center scale and cost.
In 2016, network infrastructure corporation Juniper Networks acquired Aurrion for $165 million. Aurrion’s process integrated InP into silicon photonics at the wafer scale, finding an innovative way to create a fabless semiconductor business model for making photonics. Lasers, which are traditionally difficult and expensive to make, were integrated into the chips by combining III-V materials with silicon and processing it within the silicon fabrication process. This manufacturing process was very advantageous to Juniper Networks, who have leveraged Aurrion’s cutting-edge technology to their long-term competitive advantage in the high-speed computing sector.
The exponential growth in bandwidth intensive applications like video streaming and social networking requires a way to increase the connections between servers. Within Juniper Networks, Aurrion is redefining datacenter infrastructure with their core technology that is cost efficient, power efficient and scalable for WDM architectures while also enabling greater functionality.