Interview: Finisar’s CEO reflects on a notable year

Michael Hurlston has had an eventful 2018. 

The year started with him replacing Finisar’s veteran CEO, Jerry Rawls, and it is now ending with Finisar being acquired by the firm II-VI for $3.2 billion.

Michael Hurlston

Finisar is Hurlston’s first experience in the optical component industry, having spent his career in semiconductors. One year in and he already has strong views about the industry and its direction.

“We have seen in the semiconductor industry a period of massive consolidation in the last three to four years,” says Hurlston, in his first interview sinced the deal was announced. “I think it is not that different in optics: scales matters.”    

Hurlston says that, right from the start, he recognised the need to drive industry consolidation. “We had started thinking about that fairly deeply at the time the Lumentum-Oclaro acquisition was announced and that gave us more impetus to look at this,” says Hurlston. The result was revealed in November with the announced acquisition of Finisar by II-VI.

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Rockley Photonics eyes multiple markets

Andrew Rickman, founder and CEO of silicon photonics start-up, Rockley Photonics, discusses the new joint venture with Hengtong Optic-Electric, the benefits of the company’s micron-wide optical waveguides and why the timing is right for silicon photonics. 

Andrew Rickman

The joint venture between Rockley Photonics and Chinese firm Hengtong Optic-Electric is the first announced example of Rockley’s business branching out.

The start-up’s focus has been to apply its silicon photonics know-how to data-centre applications. In particular, Rockley has developed an Opto-ASIC package that combines optical transceiver technology with its own switch chip design. Now it is using the transceiver technology for its joint venture.

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Ayar Labs advances I/O and pens GlobalFoundries deal

Silicon photonics start-up, Ayar Labs, has entered into a strategic agreement with semiconductor foundry, GlobalFoundries.

Alexandra Wright-GladsteinAyar Labs will provide GlobalFoundries with its optical input-output (I/O) technology. In return, the start-up will gain early access to the foundry’s 45nm CMOS process being tailored for silicon photonics.

GlobalFoundries has also made an investment in the start-up for an undisclosed fee.

“We gain, first and foremost, a close relationship with GlobalFoundries as we qualify our product for customers,” says Alexandra Wright-Gladstein, co-founder and CEO of Ayar Labs. “That will help us speed up availability of our product and have their weight of support behind us.”

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Has the restructuring of the optical industry already started?

The view that consolidation in the optical networking industry is needed is not new. For a decade, ever since the end of the optical boom in 2001, consolidation has been called for and has been expected. And while the many optical startups funded then have long exited or been acquired, the optical industry continues to support numerous optical networking and component generalist and specialists. 

Given the state of the telecom market, is a more fundamental industry restructuring finally on its way? 

"The business model of the communication sector needs to change, and change in a relatively short order"

Larry Schwerin, CEO of Capella Intelligent Subsystems

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NeoPhotonics secures PIC specialist Santur

Gazettabyte spoke with Tim Jenks, CEO of NeoPhotonics about the Santur acquisition, the 10x10 MSA, vertical integration and why optical components is a technology industry trend-setter

NeoPhotonics has completed the acquisition of Santur, the tunable laser and photonic integration specialist, boosting the company's annual turnover to a quarter of a billion dollars.

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Tackling the coming network crunch

A European Union research project is looking at ways to expand by one-hundredfold the capacity of an optical fibre. The project will need to develop techniques to exploit multimode and specialist fibre, and if successful, will require new fibre deployments in the network.

"In the end you run out of the ability to transmit more information along a single-mode fibre"

Ian Giles, Phoenix Photonics

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Capella: Why the ROADM market is a good place to be

Gazettabyte spoke with Larry Schwerin, CEO of Capella Intelligent Subsystems, about the ROADM market, the company's plans following its latest funding round, and the idea of a WSS-on-a-chip.

The reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) market has been the best performing segment of the optical networking market over the last year. According to Infonetics Research, ROADM-based wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) equipment grew 20% from Q2, 2010 to Q1, 2011 whereas the overall optical networking market grew 7%.

“It’s the Moore’s Law: Every two years we are doubling the capacity in terms of channel count and port count”

Larry Schwerin, Capella

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