Molex Ventures is making a strategic investment and collaboration between the Molex Optical Solutions Group and Elenion Technologies in order to jointly develop, manufacture and promote silicon photonic-based product solutions.
The venture initiative – which was launched at the end of 2017 as a subsidiary of Molex Electronic Technologies (itself a subsidiary of Koch Industries) – will collaborate with the semiconductor company to further addresses what it calls the ‘explosive’ market demand for hyperscale bandwidth with silicon photonic-based interconnect solutions. The companies are to work together to develop advanced interconnect solutions that scale to 400Gb/s and beyond.
Lily Yeung, vice president, Molex Ventures explained: ‘High-speed silicon photonic-based technologies represent a cost-disruptive solution to bandwidth scalability needs in hyperscale data centres in the high-growth optoelectronics sector. This investment and collaboration combines Elenion’s key strength in advanced silicon photonics core technology, with Molex core capabilities in complex product integration, efficient manufacturing, and global sales and marketing.’
Added Larry Schwerin, CEO, Elenion Technologies: ‘Collaborating with Molex will significantly accelerate production and deployments of our silicon photonic technology serving global customers that demand an ever-increasing pace of innovation for high-speed optical communication solutions.’
Silicon photonics technology from Elenion has also been used by vendor, Coriant, to power its short-reach CFP2-ACO pluggable module, optimised to provide cost-effective 200G connectivity over single-span distances up to 80km on its Groove G30 platform (see Coriant favours silicon photonics-powered coherent for short-reach DCI links).
