Netherlands based photonic system-on-chip developer EFFECT Photonics says it has closed a Series B funding round. Innovation Industries participated in the round; additional details, including its size and the possibility of other participants, were not disclosed. The company says it will use the money to ramp production of tunable SFPs that use its SoCs, which are based on an InP photonic integration strategy.
EFFECT Photonics expects demand for its industrial-temperature optical transceivers to grow as carriers deploy 5G infrastructure. The company announced it was sampling SFP+ transceivers at ECOC 2017 and demonstrated an automatic wavelength tuning capability between transceivers at ECOC 2018 in Rome this past September.
“We are experiencing now in photonics what we saw in the electronics integration revolution last century. There the birth of the integrated circuit enabled the mass deployment of powerful solutions,” commented EFFECT Photonics CEO James Regan. “At EFFECT Photonics we integrate all of the optical functions into a single chip and combine it with low-cost, non-hermetic packaging and automatic tuning. Thus DWDM, the proven solution for core and metro networks, is now simple, cost-effective, and scalable enough for 5G infrastructure rollouts around the world.”
EFFECT Photonics spun out of the Technical University of Eindhoven with the goal of leveraging InP as a photonic integration platform in the midst of a wave of silicon photonics startups (see “EFFECT Photonics offers 100G transceivers based on InP photonic integration”). The company closed its Series A funding for an undisclosed amount in February 2015. That initial round was led by investment company b-to-v Partners, and included the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) and Optidob.
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