What is "luxtera"

Luxtera Inc., founded in 2001, is based in Carlsbad, California. Luxtera is a fabless semiconductor company that is using silicon photonics technology to build complex electro-optical systems in a production silicon CMOS process. It is the first company on the market with a product that monolithically incorporates active optics for data communications manufactured with low-cost silicon-based chip processing.

This class of technology (also being aggressively developed by large companies such as Intel and IBM) is widely predicted to displace large portions of the existing photonics industry that rely on discrete assemblies of electronic and photonic devices. Luxtera's partners include Freescale Semiconductor (fabricates Luxtera's chips). Luxtera is a Caltech spin-out with funding from venture capital, its business partners, and DARPA. It was founded by a number of members of Prof. Axel Scherer's lab group, including Cary (Lawrence) Gunn, Michael Hochberg, Tom Baehr-Jones, and also Axel Scherer. Other co-founders include Prof. Eli Yablonovitch and John Oxaal.

In 2010, Luxtera was selected as one of MIT Technology Review's 50 Most Innovative Companies.