India Telecom

Infinera to set up R&D center

BANGALORE -- Infinera, a California-based hot technology start up which has heavyweights like Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and Pradeep Sindhu of Juniper Networks on its board, is setting up a chip design and development center in Bangalore.

Infinera, created in early 2001 by veterans from the telecommunications and optical industries, has raised $88 million in financing from top-tier venture capital firms, like Juniper Networks, Applied Materials, Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital. The optical networking upstart, recently named as one of Red Herring's top 100 future contenders, will have around 150 engineers in its Bangalore center, which will be engaged in core software development activities for the parent company. It selected Bangalore due to the availability of a critical mass of highly qualified telecom engineers. The India development centre in Bangalore will be responsible for its entire R&D activities.

Infinera does not rule out the possibility of setting up a manufacturing center in India as well. It is likely to consider India for the purpose of fabrication of its chips at a later stage as the company intends to be the pioneer in the area of chip fabrication in India as well. Infinera claims to be the world's first company to work on integrated photonic circuit that delivers thumb-nail-size chips. Its chips are designed to allow the communications service providers to offer high-speed Internet access at an affordable price. The integrated photonic circuit shrinks the discrete components in fiber optics like laser, modulators, amplifiers, transistors and electronics down to microscopic levels and combines them on a slice of indium phosphides (InP), instead of silicon.

Infinera says its chips can control light waves or photons at micron levels -- roughly 1/50th the width of a human hair -- and can be modified easily to fit into any piece of optical networking equipment. Like silicon, InP wafers, which are about three inches in diameter, can hold many microscopic circuits. According to Jagdeep Singh, co-founder and CEO of Infinera, who was one of Red Herring's top 10 entrepreneurs in 2001, Infinera is looking at commercially launching the first device based on integrated photonic circuit technology sometime next year. It will be hawking its products in India as well.