SEPTEMBER 3, 2008 -- Kotura Inc. (search for Kotura) says that Sun Microsystems (search for Sun Microsystems) has signed a five-year, $14 million development contract with Kotura for DARPA's Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communications (UNIC) program. Previously, Sun announced its participation in DARPA's $44 million program to advance a virtual supercomputer using an on-chip network of low-cost optical interconnects.
"Sun is a global leader in high-performance computing, advanced parallel computing and CPU networking," said Jean-Louis Malinge, CEO of Kotura. "Optical interconnects for CPU-to-CPU connectivity is an important application for both of our companies. We are delighted that Sun has selected Kotura for the UNIC program."
"Kotura is well positioned to deliver silicon photonic elements that will contribute directly to Sun's research efforts on this project. With Kotura's silicon photonics technology, we are on the verge of radically improving the speed of communications among the chips in powerful computing systems, thereby increasing their performance dramatically," said Jim Mitchell, vice president, new technology adoption, Sun Microsystems. "Optical interconnects increase the bandwidth between chips while reducing power consumption and chip-to-chip latency."
"We have a great working relationship with Sun and DARPA and are now expanding upon that," added Mehdi Asghari, CTO for Kotura. "Our collaboration will speed up the development of multi-layer photonics technology targeting extremely small footprints and ultra low power consumption for HPC [high-performance computing] applications. Under this work we will develop a range of key building blocks for optical interconnect such as interlayer couplers, multi-channel multiplexers and demultiplexers, integrated high-speed modulators, and detectors."
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