Objective
Data centers which underpin the Cloud are under pressure. As the capacity of data center servers is growing, so must the capacity of the links between those servers. Industry foresees a need for high volumes of 800Gb/s and 1.6Tb/s transceivers by 2025.
Today, despite the use of complex Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs), manufacturing an optical transceiver still requires a large number of sequential steps. This is because lasers and electronic chips need to be assembled on a piece-by-piece basis onto the PIC. The resulting optical engine then needs to be coupled to a fiber array and packaged. These steps are done sequentially, creating a bottleneck in the manufacturing line which makes it hard to scale up production and reduce cost.
CALADAN will demonstrate how integration of lasers and electronics onto a PIC can be done fully at the wafer-level using the established micro transfer printing technique, thus eliminating this bottleneck. GaAs quantum dot lasers and 130nm SiGe BiCMOS 56Gbaud capable driver and receiver electronics will be transfer printed onto Silicon Photonic 300mm wafers. Starting from proven concepts in PIXAPP, a novel fast fiber attachment process will be demonstrated that reduces the time required for fiber attachment by an order of magnitude. Using these techniques, transceiver cost will be 0.1Euro/Gb/s for volumes of at least 1,000,000 units.
The consortium, which consists of three SMEs (X-Celeprint, Innolume and ficonTEC), an LE (EVGroup), three research institutes (IMEC, Tyndall and IHP), a transceiver manufacturer (Mellanox) and a multinational (Xilinx) encompasses all the partners to start production of the targeted optical transceivers after the end of the project. Exploitation of the technology will be supported by an end-user (British Telecom), a semiconductor foundry setting up a micro transfer printing Pilot Line (MICROPRINCE, X-FAB), an optical equipment manufacturer (ADVA) and the European Photonic Industry Consortium (EPIC).
Fields of science
Call for proposal
H2020-ICT-2018-2
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
3001 Leuven
Belgium
Participants (9)
T12 YN60 Cork
15236 Frankfurt Oder
Participation ended
2 Dublin
44263 Dortmund
20692 Yokneam
D24T683 Dublin
28832 Achim
4782 St Florian Am Inn
D02 A342 Dublin
