A spin-out form CalTech with VC funding, capital from business partners and DARPA and SBIR support, Luxtera Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company using silicon photonics technology to build complex electro-optical systems in a production silicon CMOS process. Perhaps the first company on the market with a product that monolithically incorporates active optics for data communications manufactured with low-cost silicon-based chip processing, the firmearly found serious large firm support to incl;ice Sun Microsystems. The firm underpinning class of technology - also being aggressively developed at the time by Intel and IBM - was widely predicted to displace large portions of the existing photonics industry that rely on discrete assemblies of electronic and photonic devices. Luxtera's partners had included Freescale Semiconductor that fabricates Luxtera's chips. In December 2018, it was announced that Luxtera had been acquired by Cisco for a reported $660M
