Cisco has offered to buy Lightwire, a Pennsylvania company whose silicon photonics technology can help Cisco build the next generation of data center and carrier switches for high-speed networks.

San Jose, California-based Cisco offered to buy Lightwire for US$271m in cash, the networking giant said Friday.

The company said Lightwire’s optical interconnect technology will enable it to deliver carrier and data center networking solutions for modern applications with high-speed-network requirements, such as video, data, voice, mobility and cloud.

Surya Panditi, SVP of Cisco’s Service Provider Networking group, said the acquisition would enable customers to manage a “deluge” of traffic they are faced with while seeing their operating budgets shrink.

“With the combined know-how from Cisco in silicon design and Lightwire in CMOS photonics, we will transform Cisco's optical connectivity business to an integrated technology platform that supports our customers' burgeoning need for cost-effective high-speed networks,” Panditi said.

CMOS stands for complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor. Also known as silicon photonics, the technology replaces electrons as carriers of data within a computer system with light, hence the name “photonics”.

It is sometimes touted as a way to keep up with Moore’s Law, because it allows for much smaller and more efficient silicon chips. Data is transferred by laser within a chip or between multiple chips quicker and with less room for error. Silicon is used as the medium that carries light in such systems.

Another major appeal of silicon photonics is that the products can be manufactured using standard silicon manufacturing equipment and processes.

Cisco said Lightwire’s small, low-power technology will enable switches, routers and optican transport systems to have higher-density optical connectivity at a lower cost.