Project description
A data communications star is born
Data access and usage has exponentially expanded since the 1970s as a result of continually evolving technology. While techies may salivate at the prospect of the next generation of data communication technologies, technology providers and manufacturers struggle to keep pace as systems become outdated or incompatible. The future of data communication and ever-expanding interconnectedness lies in enhancing the volume and rate of data that can be transmitted and received with high integrity while reducing the energy requirements and the costs. The EU-funded NEBULA project plans to do just that in a very big way, nurturing the genesis of disruptive future-proof transceiver technology with astronomical data rates and energy efficiency.
Objective
NEBULA aims to provide the foundations for a common future-proof transceiver technology platform with ultra-high bandwidth capabilities offered by a CMOS compatible toolkit and tailored towards meeting performance, cost and energy metrics in both inter-DCI coherent and intra-DCI ASIC co-packaged optics. NEBULA will be investing in the established bandwidth- and energy saving credentials of plasmonic modulator solutions together with the functional digital processing portfolio of neuromorphic optical reservoir computing engines towards painting the landscape of the next-coming disruption in transceiver evolution, tailoring them in System-in-Package prototype assemblies that can intersect with the challenging framework of both inter- and intra-DCI segments. NEBULA target to demonstrate i) a fully-functional 8-channel 112Gbaud 16QAM C-band transceiver prototype, offering an aggregate capacity of 3.2Tbps and requiring just 2.65W per single 400Gbps wavelength, providing in this way an energy efficiency of only 6.625pJ/bit with energy savings of 93% compared to current 200Gbps and 19W-consuming pluggable optics and ii) a fully-functional sub-Volt 8-channel 112Gbaud PAM4 O-band transmitter co-packaged with a data generating ASIC from Mellanox, offering a 1.6Tbps aggregate capacity with up to 37% energy savings compared to the estimated power requirements of respective Si-photonic-based co-packaged solutions.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
546 36 THESSALONIKI
Greece