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Content archived on 2024-06-18

Revolutionary Advances in Photonics Integration Being Applied for Optical Communication

Project description


Photonics

Our goal is to develop technology for fast optical communication using revolutionary concepts that challenge the mainstream approaches for photonics integration and packaging. The primary application is optical communication inside high performance computing systems, such as supercomputers and datacenters, but the technologies will also find use in many other applications.Power-efficient InP VCSEL arrays will be directly modulated to provide up to 50 Gb/s signals at 1.3 µm wavelength where optical fibers have no chromatic dispersion. Fast InP photodiode arrays will receive the signals. Our semiconductor optical amplifiers and electroabsorption modulators will be based on novel dilute nitride materials that enable low-cost fabrication on large GaAs wafers and uncooled operation. Passive components will be realised with 3 µm SOI waveguides that are integrated with polymer waveguides for athermal operation and highly efficient, polarisation independent and ultra-broadband I/O coupling. Innovative concepts will radically shrink the footprint of the SOI and GaAs chips, and avoid chip-level processing steps. The hybrid integration of active chips on SOI and the wafer-level packaging of the optoelectronic modules will be based on novel concepts that significantly improve the alignment accuracy, yield, throughput and passive cooling, and also lead to dramatic reduction in the cost and size of the modules. To increase the datarate and to enable flexible communication between processors we apply advanced modulation formats, wavelength multiplexing and optical packet switching. We demonstrate up to 80 Gb/s per wavelength without offline signal processing, and up to 8 wavelength channels. The concept is directly scalable to Pb/s systems by combining spatial and wavelength multiplexing. For intra-rack communication we also integrate single-mode polymer waveguides into line cards and backplanes and develop optical connectors between those and the optoelectronic modules.

Call for proposal

FP7-ICT-2013-11
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

TEKNOLOGIAN TUTKIMUSKESKUS VTT OY
EU contribution
€ 0,00
Address
TEKNIIKANTIE 21
02150 Espoo
Finland

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Region
Manner-Suomi Helsinki-Uusimaa Helsinki-Uusimaa
Activity type
Research Organisations
Administrative Contact
Timo Aalto (Dr.)
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (7)