The Record Breaking Company

Marvell Announces Acquisition of Polariton Technologies, Advancing Optical Performance Scaling to 3.2T and Beyond

Adds Plasmonics-based Modulation Technology and a Team with Deep Silicon Photonics Expertise to Advance Marvell’s Optical Roadmap

Plasmonic electro-optic modulators are fast. Polariton Technologies stands behind innovation for optical data communication and breaks the speed record year after year together with its research partner Institute for Electromagnetic Fields at the ETH Zurich.

The latest achivement in terms of speed dates back early 2025 with a paper demonstrating 1 THz modulation:

Press release: ETH Zurich and Polariton Achieve Record-Breaking EO Bandwidth Modulators

While this is research at the moment, it also paves the path for optical communication at 400G, 800G and 1.6T per lane.

Electro-optical bandwidth exceeding 145 GHz
— Less distortion and fewer requirements to digital signal processing (DSP)

Ultra-compact integration at the micrometer scale
— Reduces footprint and allows for high channel density

Scalability with silicon photonics
— Ensures high-volume manufacturing and supply chain management

Roadmap beyond 300 GHz
— Future-proof platform for ultra-high-speed networking standards

Industry leading integration / high channel density
– 16 (6.4T) and 32 (12.8T) lanes, higher channel count for on-board (OBO) and co-packaged optics (CPO)

Driver integration
– Optimization of signal path, RF performance, drive voltages for outstanding RF performance and form factor

Less system power
– Leading power dissipation architecture with less than 200 mW per lane and 0.5 pJ/bit, with a roadmap for further reduction

Outstanding signal integrity
– Improved signal integrity (1E-6 bit error rate) and quantitatively better eye diagrams