LONDON — OneChip Photonics Inc. (Ottawa, Canada), a developer of optical circuits in indium phospide, has secured $19.5 million in venture capital financing from Canadian and U.S. investors including BDC Venture Capital, DCM, GrowthWorks Canadian Fund and Morgenthaler Ventures.
The money would enable the company to deliver a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) transceiver and expand its operations, the company said. The company said its transceiver would provide higher performance than competing solutions at lower cost.
"OneChip is well positioned to help system providers and carriers deploy FTTH more cost-effectively than ever before and meet consumer and business demand for high-bandwidth voice, data and video services," said Jim Hjartarson, CEO of OneChip Photonics, in a statement. "OneChip is one of only a few companies with new core intellectual property and advanced technology in the optical transceiver business that can sustain a competitive advantage over other optical component providers, which rely on conventional technology and assembly processes."
Currently, the company is developing these low-cost, high-performance transceivers for Optical Network Terminals (ONTs) and Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) in Ethernet PON (EPON) and Gigabit PON (GPON) networks.
OneChip is monolithically integrating the functions required for an optical transceiver onto a single, InP-based chip. All active and passive components of the chip; including the distributed-feedback (DFB) laser, optically pre-amplified detector (OPAD), wavelength splitter, spot-size converter and various elements of passive waveguide circuitry are, uniquely, integrated in one epitaxial growth step, without re-growth or post-growth modification of the epitaxial material.
With respect to transmit performance, OneChips single-frequency DFB lasers will offer a superior performance in terms of reach and bit rate than competing Fabry-Perot (FP) lasers, OneChip said. OneChip's photonic ICs are designed for automated mounting on a silicon optical bench, without requiring active alignment, using industry-standard, automated assembly processes.
Market research firm Ovum has forecasted that the number of FTTx subscribers — including Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) subscribers and Fiber-to-the-Building (FTTB) subscribers — will increase from about 48 million by the end of 2009 to more than 100 million by the end of 2012. Today, FTTx broadband users comprise about 8 percent of all broadband users, according to Ovum, and it expects that FTTx broadband users will comprise about 16 percent of all broadband users by 2012. Ovum estimates that the annual FTTx optical transceiver market will grow from $387 million in 2009 to $594 million in 2013.
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