August 1, 2024
The European Commission has published five innovations developed in the EU-funded POETICS research and innovation project on the Innovation Radar website. The Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI) is recognized as a "key innovator". Fraunhofer HHI and its project partners developed technologies that enable the scaling of data centers as well as the growth of wired infrastructures for further 5G rollout.
The POETICS project‘s approach is based on a paradigm shift in the assembly and packaging of transceivers with terabit capacity. Hybrid integration of InP, PolyBoard and TriPleX technologies in combination with SiGe BiCMOS,enabled the POETICS team to select the best performing photonic and electronic materials for their PICs.
The 1.6 Tb/s optical O-band transceiver, developed in the project, operates at 100 GBaud PAM-4 for intra-datacenter connections and has already been successfully validated in transmission experiments. A single-channel bit rate distance transmission of 3,720 Gb/s-km was demonstrated. The project partners will present the results at ECOC 2024 in Frankfurt: "A packaged 1.6 Tb/s O-band optical transceiver based on the hybrid integration of SiGe electronics and InP-polymer photonics".
The innovations recognized by the Innovation Radar are: "High speed EML array for uncooled operation in terabit transceivers", "3D polymer-based 8-core Multi Core Fibers (MCF) interposer", "Integrated optical circuit switches targeting intra-DC networks", "Polymer-based flip-chip PolyBoard platform for insertion of photonics chips" and "High capacity (1.6Tb/s) Optical engines for intra-DC connections (500m-2km reach)".
In the POETICS project, Fraunhofer HHI is collaborating with: ICCS/NTUA (Greece), LioniX International BV (Netherlands), IMEC (Belgium), Optagon Photonics (Greece), PHIX BV (Netherlands), Mellanox Technologies Ltd (Israel) and Telecom Italia Spa (Italy).
The project was funded by the European Union as part of the Horizon 2020 program.