CoPackaging of Terabit direct-detection and coherent Optical Engines and switching circuits in mulTI–Chip moduleS for Datacenter networks and the 5G optical fronthaul

Announcement of Project Launch

POETICS was officially kicked off on January 14-15, 2020 at the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS) in Athens, Greece. All eight (8) members of the consortium were gathered for a two-day productive meeting and worked together to review the project work plan and the lines of action, define immediate actions and goals, and conduct detailed planning.

POETICS is a H2020 Research and Innovation project funded by the European Union aiming to bring the optical interconnect technology with all performance, functionality and cost credentials and allow the Datacenter (DC) networks to scale and the 5G wired infrastructures to grow.

Enabling terabit-capacity optical interconnects requires a paradigm shift in the packaging approach. The electrical interconnect distance between the optical engine (OE) and the digital switching chip must be minimized, signal conditioning chips and unwanted components, like sockets that would otherwise be required and would inevitably lead to increased power consumption and reduced signal integrity, should be removed. It also requires the right combination of photonic and electronic technology to be integrated in order to deliver high performance, low-cost and energy efficient optical engines.

POETICS will develop novel Terabit optical engines and optical switching circuits and co-package them with digital switching chips to realize Multi-Chip Modules (MCM) for next generation switching equipment with >12.8 Tb/s capacities and very high energy efficiency that fit into the roadmap of vendors. In order to achieve these goals POETICS will utilize SiGe BiCMOS, InP, PolyBoard and TriPleX technologies and rely on hybrid integration, which allows the selection and combination of the best performing components.

The specific targets in POETICS are to develop:

• MCM with 1.6 Tb/s OEs based on 8-fold InP-EML arrays (200 Gb/s per lane) and PolyBoard with parallel SMFs on par with the PSM/DR spec for 500 m – 2 km intra-DC connectivity;
• MCM with 1.6 Tb/s OEs based on 8-fold InP-EML arrays (200 Gb/s per lane) and 3D PolyBoard with duplex MCFs for 5G optical fronthaul applications;
• Low-power-consumption 3D Benes optical switch;
• MCM coherent 64 Gbaud OEs with up to 600 Gb/s capacity of DC interconnect applications within 80 – 120 km reach on par with 400G-ZR specification.

All news, publications, and other outputs of the project will be available on the official project website at ict-poetics.eu.

Call H2020-ICT-2019-2: ICT-05-2019 – Application driven Photonics components

GA ID. 871769

Project start: 1 January 2020

Project duration:   36 Months

total funding:  € 5.814.568,75

8 Partners, 6 Countries

For more info, visit the POETICS website

ict-poetics.eu

Project Launch – Kick-off meeting

The implementation of TERAWAY project was officially inaugurated with the kick-off meeting that took place on 3rd and 4th of December 2019. All the twelve (12) members of the consortium were gathered for a two-day productive meeting at the premises of Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin in order to analyze TERAWAY’s workplan in depth, specify in detail the role of each partner in the project’s deployment and define the next actions. 

TERAWAY is a H2020 5GPPP Phase III project funded by the European Union coming as a technology intensive project aiming to develop a disruptive generation of THz transceivers for high-capacity BH and FH links in 5G networks.

Leveraging optical concepts and photonic integration techniques, TERAWAY will develop a common technology base for the generation, emission and detection of wireless signals with selectable symbol rate and bandwidth up to 25.92 GHz within an ultra-wide range of carrier frequencies covering the W-band (92-114.5 GHz), D-band (130-174.8 GHz) and THz band (252-322 GHz).

In this way, TERAWAY steps into providing for the first time the possibility to organize the spectral resources of a network within these bands into a common pool of radio resources that can be flexibly coordinated and used.

The use of photonics will enable the development of multi-channel transceivers with amplification of the wireless signals in the optical domain and with multi-beam optical beamforming in order to have a radical increase in the directivity of each wireless beam. In parallel, aiming to take the most out of the THz technology and enable its commercial uptake, the project will develop a new software defined networking (SDN) controller and an extended control hierarchy that will perform the management of the network and the radio resources in a homogeneous way with obvious benefits for the network performance and energy efficiency and with possibilities for the provision of network slices in order to support heterogeneous services.

At the end of this development, TERAWAY will make available a set of ground breaking transceiver modules including 4-channel modules operating from 92 up to 322 GHz, with possibility to offer 241 Gb/s total data rate, to have more than 400 m transmission reach in the THz band (and few Km in the lower bands), and with 4 wireless beams that can be independently steered and establish BH and FH connections between fixed terrestrial and moving network nodes. The TERAWAY transceivers will be evaluated at the 5G demo site of AALTO and NOKIA in Finland, under an application scenario of communication and surveillance coverage of outdoor mega-events using moving nodes in the form of heavy-duty drones.

TERAWAY project comprises twelve (12) partners from six (6) European countries among which:

three vendors: Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo (ES), Intracom S.A. Telecom Solutions (GR) and SIAE Microelettronica S.p.A. (IT);

two industry-oriented research institutes: Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute (FhG-HHI) and Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (DE), Leibniz-Institut fuer Hoechstfrequenztechnik (DE);

four SMEs: LioniX International BV (NL), Optagon Photonics (GR), PHIX Photonics Assembly (NL), Cumucore OY (FIN) and

three academic organizations: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (ES), Aalto University (FIN) and the Institute of Communications & Computer Systems of the National technical University of Athens (GR) that coordinates the action.

For more info, visit TERAWAY website

ict-teraway.eu