Kotura started making products for the data centre which attracted Mellanox’s attention. The outfit has been branching out into Ethernet lately and said it will write an $82 million cheque for Kotura. Kotura, which I profiled last November, makes a photonics chip that allows signals to pass between chips using light instead of electrons. This makes communications between chips faster, something becoming more important inside the data centre.

The Kotura chip is a fibre-based transceiver that can deliver 100 gigabits per second inside the data centre. It can fit next to the CPU or inside a switch. Theoretically the technology could go to a terabit per second and it is being used used in high-performance compute clusters. These clusters are the sort of place that Infiniband likes to hang out in.