AraLight Inc. develops, manufactures and markets terabit-class, ultra-dense optical components and subsystems that eliminate interconnect bottlenecks for original equipment manufacturers in the telecommunications and IT/data storage industries. The company provides optical backplane solutions for routers, switches, optical and electrical cross connects, servers, and parallel computing equipment at the bay, shelf, and card levels. The company's technology stems from Bell Laboratories, where the AraLight staff built up a combined 100 years of experience and worked with a $35 million focused research and development budget from 1994 to 2000. In September 2000, Lucent Technologies spun out AraLight and the entire Bell Labs team transitioned to AraLight. AraLight's technology enables the intimate integration of photonic components, including optical detectors, optical modulators, and vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), to high-speed Silicon VLSI-electronics. The integration results in a two dimensional opto-electronic packaging chip/module technology, with hundreds (to thousands) of direct optical inputs and outputs per chip, with each optical I/O capable of multi-gigabit-per-second data rates. Further integration between AraLight modules and other VLSI circuits, such as SerDes/CDR and switch fabric, will enable AraLight to collapse an entire switching card into a single small form factor subsystem resulting in: 90% reduction in form factor 90% reduction in power consumption 50% to 70% cost savings for carriers A 20,000-square-foot facility in Monroe Township, N.J., houses AraLight, including 7,500-square-feet manufacturing facility, a 1,500-square-foot clean room, and 2,000 square feet of test labs.