On June 20th, Finisar was named a Top Bay Area Workplace by the Bay Area News Group. More than 1,200 companies were surveyed and 60 were selected based on an employee ranking of several attributes including company leadership, training, workplace flexibility, and diversity. I am honored to work for a company that treats its employees well and embodies a culture driven by nice, participative and hard working individuals. In my eight years at Finisar, I have seen a lot of changes, but we have remained true to our culture and hard work, openness and innovation.
To our staff especially, THANK YOU for Making Finisar a Top Bay Area Workplace!
Read more about this award.
The Lightspeed Blog will take a break next week as we celebrate the Fourth of July – our national Independence Day. For those of you in the USA, I wish you all a safe and relaxing holiday.
This week’s Lightspeed post comes from guest blogger Pritha Khurana, Components Product Line Manager for Finisar.
The last few weeks have been very busy for Finisar. Spread across the world, our team participated in both the ISC and Sensors Expo conferences. I flew to Chicago to spend June 7 through June 9 at the annual Sensor event, co-located with the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). I love the opportunity to reconnect face-to-face with our customers and partners, discuss fiber optic communication advances in the enterprise with our industry colleagues, and of course the chance to meet potential customers. At this event, Finisar showcased its VCSEL technology – used for precision optical sensor applications – at the company’s booth. Finisar’s demonstration of precision velocity sensing using VCSELs for a completely non-contact system drew a lot of interest. A number of customers expressed an interest in turbidity sensing using lasers as well.
I spent two solid days meeting with customers and partners at this year’s Sensors conference, which drew more attendees than last year. The sensors industry, a space Finisar is engaged in through its VCSEL products has widely embraced the areas of MEMs-Based Systems, Energy Harvesting, Smart Power, Data Acquisition, Wireless Networking, and more.
While a busy couple of weeks for Finisar, the time with our customers, partners and industry peers discussing “what’s next”, and discovering how Finisar is an important facet of these next steps was as valuable as ever.
Simon Poole and Steve Frisken, the founders of Finisar Australia have been recognised for their contributions to Australian Innovation by being named as two of the Warren Centre’s “Innovation Heroes” for 2010 at a ceremony at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney on Tuesday evening, 8th June.
The Innovation Heroes awards are presented to individuals recognised for developing and commercialising a range of cutting-edge technologies and innovations that have significantly contributed to the economic progress of Australia.
According to Professor Mike Dureau, Executive Director of The Warren Centre, “It’s one thing to have a good engineering idea and another to develop and commercialise the technology and then sell it to the world. Each of this year’s Heroes Award recipients possess a unique vision and drive to see their products commercialised to benefit of a range of local and international industries. The capacity of each finalist to successfully give life to great ideas that also benefit the Australian economy must be applauded.”
“Australian engineers are a leading force in the economic growth of Australia and their creativity, innovation and entrepreneurial skills are the qualities that continue to help shape the future of Australia and in many cases, the world,” added Professor Dureau.
The citations for Simon and Steve were as follows:
Dr. Simon Poole is an innovator in communications and photonics technologies. He co-invented the Erbium-Doped Fibre Amplifier with a market of $300M pa. He founded and sold two successful photonics companies, INDX and Engana, responsible for developing world leading Wavelength Selective Switching technologies. He is now working as the Director, New Business Ventures of Finisar Australia to expand the company’s core activities into the field of Optical Instrumentation.
Dr. Steven Frisken was a co-founder of Photonic Technologies which was acquired by Nortel Networks, and he became the interim CEO. He introduced a telecommunications optical circulator adopted by industry and passive and dynamic EDFA gain flattening filters leading to the first laboratory DWDM amplifiers. Steve Frisken also co-founded Engana with Simon Poole, Australia’s most successful optical start-up company.
Congratulations Simon and Steve!
This week’s blog post comes from Katharine Schmidtke, Finisar’s Strategic Marketing Manager.
I had the pleasure of attending the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC) event May 31-June 3, in Hamburg Germany. The show was well attended and appeared to have doubled in size from last year. In attendance were all the major industry suppliers and leading technology providers such as Mellanox, QLogic, Voltaire, NVidia, HP, IBM, Cray, Oracle, AMD, Intel, LSI, Supermicro and STEC. Key themes included supercomputing, storage and networking. Of those, hot trends discussed were cloud and parallel computing as well as the future developments to come in the next 10 years. The trend to higher bandwidth continues, with the IBTA announcing the latest roadmap which adds a new datarate at FDR (14 Gbps) in addition to EDR (26 Gbps). InfiniBand is targeting 300 Gbps by 2011 in a 12 lane format running at 26Gbps per lane.
And as I sat through the presentations and spoke to some of the folks on the show floor, it became evident that there are two central themes underpinning all the major business and HPC initiatives – latency and flexibility. Reducing latency is key for supercomputers, while flexibility is the driver in cloud computing. NVidia made quite a splash with their Tesla C2050 GPUs which are used to improve data crunching speeds in many supercomputers, including the new #2 supercomputer – the Nebulae system built by Dawning in China. Dr. Wilfried Oed from Cray shared some of the secrets in the new XE-6 supercomputer including the new Gemini network card which he admits is “more than just a router” by increasing processing speeds using a clever non-blocking routing system.
On the news front, the biannual 35th edition of the Top 500 supercomputer list was released. The U.S. continues to take the lead in the number one spot with Jaguar, the fastest supercomputer system used for The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Computing Facility. Trailing close behind and ranked second on the list is Nebulae, China’s fastest system worldwide.
Other noteworthy technical initiatives point to Intel, who dominates the high-end process market with roughly 82% of all systems and over 90% of quad-core based systems. IBM recoups the lead in market share by total systems and overall performance from Hewlet-Packard (HP). And exciting for Finisar – we were part of the 120 Gb/s InfiniBand demonstration at this year’s event. Check out the press release issued by the HPC Advisory Council to learn more.
Until next year’s ISC show, Auf Wiedersehen, as they say in German!
As you may have read recently, Finisar is now the number 1 WSS/ROADM supplier globally, with a particular strength in high-performance WSS for 50GHz channel spacing. As I discussed in my last post the flexibility of our core LCoS technology means that we’re extremely well positioned to meet the needs of upcoming flex-grid architectures for 100G and above transmission. Our WaveShaper product range is also expanding – again driven strongly by the growth in advanced modulation formats and coherent systems but also by expansion into other markets including microwave photonics and laser pulse manipulation.
To support all this growth, we’re expanding our engineering and R&D teams here in Sydney and are looking to hire a whole lot more engineers and scientists. We’re looking for people with a range of skills, including opto-mechanical engineers, software engineers, optical designers and high-speed electronics whizzes as well as manufacturing and process engineers to support the manufacturing ramp that comes with a growing market share in a rapidly-expanding market.
Sydney is a tremendously cosmopolitan city (heck, we’ve even got Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson curating a city-wide arts festival this month) with a great, year-round lifestyle and (particularly important for me these days) great food and wine…
Our facility is located in Waterloo, only 10 minutes to the heart of the city, with thriving local arts and restaurant scene and good access by road and public transport. We provide competitive salaries and full relocation packages. If you’re interested, check out this page or contact theodora.liosatis@finisar.com.
Award | Rafik Ward | 
June 30, 2010 1:26 pm | 
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