H2020 COSMICC (2015-2019) demonstrates a 100 Gb/s low-power consumption CWDM silicon photonics on-board optical transceiver module and a full library of new broad-band and athermal components on a SiN- enhanced silicon photonics platform including III-V/Si lasers for datacenter interconnects.
To support the exponential growth of data traffic in datacenters, high-speed, power-efficient and low-cost transmission solutions are required
Since a few years, information and communication technologies have entered the Zettabyte era (1 ZB =1021 bytes = 1 billion terabytes). In 2019, more than 10 ZB of information were created in a year and this number is doubling every 2 years. Datacenters are the main locations of data transmission and storage. The great challenge faced by our society is how to enable and support the exponential growth in digital information while reducing the power we consume. Compared to electrical cables, optical fiber interconnects are fast, have very low loss and do not heat-up the channel. Low-cost (<1€/Gbit/s), high speed (> 100 Gb/s per fiber) and energy efficient (< 10 pJ/bit) optical transceivers up to 2 km reach will be therefore be the key
The current optical transceiver solutions for intra-datacenter applications suffer from several limitations. VCSELs-based transceivers are low-cost but their speed and reach are limited while traditional telecom InP-based WDM transceivers can provide high rate and high reach but are too expensive. Optical integration on Silicon using CMOS compatible process, with mass-production capabilities has the promise to significantly reduce cost while meeting the needed performances.
The COSMICC consortium
The COSMICC consortium was formed to develop the technology over the whole value chain to build silicon photonics high data rate transceivers for datacenters, multiplexing several wavelength channels according to the CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing) standard, with no thermal control in order to minimize the power consumption.
The consortium was led by CEA-Leti and gathered key industrial and research partners with world- leading positions in the fields of optical components (University of Soutampton, University of Paris-Sud, Cork Institute of Technology and University of Saint-Andrews), Silicon photonics (STmicroelectronics France, CEA-Leti), CMOS electronics (STmicroelectronics Italy, University of Pavia), Printed Circuit Board-Packaging (Finisar, CEA-Leti) and PCB-embedded packaging (Vario-Optics), Optical transceivers (Finisar) and Datacenters (Seagate).
