Technical Insight
AraLight gets the Lucent spin (Cover Story - VCSELs)
Lucent Technologies has founded a new venture, AraLight, which will use technology developed at Bell Labs to integrate very large numbers of VCSELs and detectors with prefabricated silicon ICs. "We expect our higher port densities and smaller form factor will eventually allow us to develop products that have aggregate speeds of many terabits per second, all in a single compact package," says Michael Camp, CEO of AraLight. AraLight is targeting the integration of 2-D arrays with many hundreds or thousands of optical channels, each with multi-GHz data rates. Innovative fiber array packaging is being designed to transport data to and from the optoelectronic-VSLI chips. The silicon ICs themselves will have receiver and driver functionality capable of low power conversion of analog optical signals into digital electronic signals. Like Peregrine, AraLight does not have any plans to manufacture optoelectronic chips. The companies have different approaches to getting light into and out of the bump-bonded VCSEL/detector/silicon structures; in AraLight s case, the GaAs substrate is removed to allow backside emission from the VCSELs. Created by Lucent s New Ventures group, AraLight is located in Monroe Township, New Jersey. The company has received investments totaling some $10 million, and its team has access to more than 70 patents.
