The Company

MultiPhy is a fabless semiconductor start-up company providing digital-signal- processing-based integrated circuits for high speed optical communications. Established in November 2006, based on technology that was developed at Ben-Gurion University by Prof. Dan Sadot, the company is developing 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s CMOS chips for direct detect and coherent receivers.

The Problem

The tremendous growth in network traffic requires an upgrade of the backbone links to 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s. However, at these high data rates, the fiber is no longer an ideal medium; the transmitted signal is impaired during transmission and transceivers can no longer be built using traditional techniques. Analog to digital conversion in conjunction with advanced digital signal processing techniques is required. The design of such advanced A/D-DSP based receivers is challenging and requires interdisciplinary skills, including communications theory and optical communications, digital signal processing and related algorithms, analog to digital conversion and mixed signal integrated circuits design and ultra high speeds. Many of the transceiver module companies and systems companies do not possess such skills.