Acacia Celebrates 10 Years of Disruptive Innovation #Acacia10

By Raj Shanmugaraj, President and Chief Executive Officer | Posted on August 19, 2019

2019 officially marks Acacia’s 10-year anniversary. As we look back at the last decade, it’s clear that a driving force in the products we developed was making our customers successful. Their winning has been – and will continue to be – the accomplishment we are most proud of as we look back at our history. Thus, in honor of our Anniversary, we’d like to personally thank all of our customers for giving us the opportunity to work together over the last ten years to solve some of the toughest optical networking challenges in the industry. As part of our 10 year anniversary celebration, some of our customers sent over their birthday wishes. We decided to share some of them in this post since this milestone would not be possible without them.

It All Started with Innovation

Acacia was officially founded in 2009 by Mehrdad Givehchi, Benny Mikkelsen, and Christian Rasmussen. At the time, every element of a high-speed network was based on silicon technology – except for the optical interconnects. Their vision was to replace the exotic materials typically used for optical interconnects with silicon, leveraging the benefits and scale of standard electronics CMOS processes. This vision, which we refer to as the “siliconization of the optical interconnect” enabled coherent interconnects to transform from the size of a pizza box to the size of an iPhone – AND enabled us to significantly reduce the power consumption of our products.

Our first product, introduced in 2011, demonstrated our ability to produce high-performance optical interconnect solutions designed to address the needs of content and communication network providers and we have been innovating ever since. The below graphic illustrates our product innovation over the last 10 years.

Acacia has maintained a rapid pace of innovation over the last 10 years

 

The Next 10!

If you look at the innovation that has occurred in the last decade, it’s exciting to consider what the next 10 years may hold, including new markets and applications for optical component technology. For example, as we continue to drive smaller form factors, higher density, and lower power, we expect to see coherent moving closer to shorter reach applications. Higher capacity links inside data centers are likely to consider coherent as the number of lasers needed for direct detect increases and becomes a burden to operators. These are just a few examples, but there will likely be many opportunities for opto-electronic integration to benefit new and adjacent markets. These may include applications such as LIDAR, 3D sensing, and deep learning, but it may also include opportunities we have not even considered.

Thanks to all of our customers and partners that sent us 10th Anniversary wishes. If you have an Anniversary wish you’d like to share, we’d love to hear it. Submit it here.