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Integrated silicon photonics expert, Rockley Photonics, has expanded its strategic relationship with fiber-optic technology company, Hengtong Optic-Electric Co. Ltd (Hengtong). The Suzhou-based joint venture with Hengtong addresses the burgeoning 400G DR4 transceiver market. As part of the same deal, Hengtong will invest $30m in Rockley’s Series E funding round.

Rockley-Hengtong is expanding its 2017 joint venture, increasing its portfolio to develop, manufacture and sell 400G DR4 Transceivers utilizing Rockley’s LightDriver Optical Engines. According to Mahesh Karanth, Chief Finance Officer at Rockley, the commercial expansion and the Series E funding round provides the company with significant capital to move to the next stage of its business plan. Rockley will accelerate volume manufacturing of its LightDriver Optical Engine and develop next-generation sensors and communications products. This technology, according to Mahesh, will help to meet the new connectivity requirements for datacenters, supporting cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Emerging applications like AI, machine learning, AR/VR, and 5G wireless, are driving network traffic to unprecedented levels. As bandwidth requirements increase, datacenters are looking to deploy higher switching capacity. The unique architecture of Rockley’s LightDriver facilitates the transition to in-package optics for 51T switches and drives a broad spectrum of connectivity products including 400G and 800G pluggables, which are required for the large-scale deployment of 12.8T and 25.6T switches. This will enable datacenters to adopt fiber-to-the-server and eliminate the need for costly, high-power electrical signaling.

According to Andrew Rickman, the Chairman and Chief executive at Rockley Photonics, the LightDriver is the world’s first 400G engine supporting 1310nm on a fully integrated, optimized waveguide platform. Its tight integration with electronics enabled by advanced 2.5D packaging is key to facilitating the high bandwidth and dense optical I/O required by increasing network traffic. The LightDriver technology in Rockley’s chipsets, according to Rickman, is important for datacenters wishing to improve performance while reducing power and costs.