Monday, November 28, 2011

Aurrion Gets $13.9M DARPA Contract

Goleta-based Aurrion, a developer of silicon photonics fabrication technology, reported today that it has been awarded $13.9M in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract. Aurrion said that the multi-year contrat, which it won as part of a collaboration with the University of California at Santa Barbara, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington and Rockwell Collins, will go towards developing new technologies and architectures for electronic-photonic integrated circuits on a common silicon substrate. Aurrion's technology is aimed at allowing active components such as lasers and amplifiers to be fabricated on silicon wafers. The firm's Chairman and co-founder is John Bowers, cofounder of Calient Networks and founder of Terabit Technology; Bowers is now a professor at UCSB.