QAMeleon, a 5-year project with ~8M EUR budget and a consortium of 16 partners, managed to bring innovation in the European telecom industry. QAMeleon was a very forward-looking project at the time it started which is still relevant in terms of market forecast, standardization and industrial trends, allowing all its partners to gain significant footing in the upcoming era of telecom networks.
At the project start (2017) 64 Gbaud transceivers were making their debut in the market, 90 Gbaud generation was an intermediate step that will be superseded towards 128 Gbaud transceivers with first products demonstrations in 2023. The new NLL design has been adopted within FNSR in several products of the company while the new packaging concepts including higher-speed rf package feedthroughs, 128Gbaud PCBA test board designs led to invest in the improvement of the company’s measurement capabilities and to setup first in-house 128Gbaud characterization systems towards the development of the 128Gbaud/800Gbps IC-TROSA. The InP modulator new highspeed approaches is the only technology for double-bandwidth while maintaining a low Vpi for low power consumption. On the electronics side, dual-channel linear InP DHBT drivers and TIAs are key components for the development of CDM and ICR for 96 and 130 Gbaud systems as well as analog multiplexers showing remarkable performances targeting future >1Tbps transceivers. The highspeed DAC design on SiGe BiCMOS technology has led to a new design of a CMOS-based DAC targeting both high speed (> 160 GSps) yet exploiting low power consumption. Finally, a combined transceiver solution based on the QAMeleon photonics and electronics technologies strengthened joint exploitation potential via technology transfer and joint product development among its partners.
The global market for ROADM WSS components is envisaged to be doubled by 2026 (reaching ~1.2 billion USD) with US and Japan being the main players in this field. Europe lacks the manufacturing capabilities and local design. QAMeleon brings the entire value chain into play, with InP polarization insensitive fabrication, and the polymer host board is key for integrating multiple InP PICs towards a compact densely integrated WSS solution which is compounded by the polarization insensitive development done within QAMeleon. The use of InP is enabled through components such as spot size converters for the interface of the InP PIC platform with other platforms (eg. EOPCB) and underpinned with validated and tested integration and packaging process flows. ALTER brings the entire integration and packaging expertise, thusly providing the entire value chain. QAMeleon approach is a way for Europe to have an integrated and port-scalable WSSs that will leverage the benefits of optical switching architectures in metro/core networks as well as datacenter interconnect applications. It is also imperative to add, that the cooperation of the relevant companies and experts in these fields (SMART, VARIO, ALTER) will lead to joint exploitation scenarios.
During QAMeleon, two patents were submitted; IMEC patent on Analog Interleavers and SMART patent on polarization insensitive SSCs.
