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How To Make a Photonic Integrated Circuit

Insights

January 19, 2022

Leveraging the Power of External Foundries in Photonics

Working with a world-class high-volume foundry makes scaling up from low to high volume as…

Working with a world-class high-volume foundry makes scaling up from low to high volume as easy as putting a purchase order in place. Instead of having to buy equipment, develop processes, and train operators over many years, a fabless photonics developer can leverage foundries who already have these capabilities and knowledge.

Thanks to wafer scale technology, electronics has successfully driven down cost per transistor for many decades. This allowed the world to enjoy chips that every generation became smaller and provided exponentially more computing power for the same amount of money. This scale-up process is how everyone now has a computer processor in their pocket that is millions of times more powerful than the most advanced computers of the 1960s that landed men on the moon.

This progress in electronics integration is a key factor that brought down the size and cost of coherent transceivers, packing more bits than ever into smaller areas. However, photonics has struggled to keep up with electronics, and now the optics dominate the optical transceiver’s cost. If the transceiver cost curve does not continue to decrease, it will be difficult to achieve the goal of making coherent technology more accessible across the entire optical network. This will make it more difficult to provide the services needed by cloud providers and the growing 5G access networks.

As we mentioned in our previous article, photonics manufacturing must move into wafer-scale territory to provide faster, more affordable, and sustainable coherent transmission.

However, most photonic chip developers don’t have human and financial resources to own and operate their own wafer-scale photonic foundries. Fortunately, electronic chip developers have shown a more viable and cost-effective alternative: the fabless model.

A Lower Upfront Investment

Increasing the volume of photonics manufacturing is a big challenge. Some photonic chip developers choose to manufacture their chips in-house within their own fabrication facilities. This approach has some strong advantages, as it gives component manufacturers full control over their production process. By vertically integrating the whole chip design, manufacturing, and testing process within the same company, it’s often easier to try out new changes and innovations to the product.

Figure 1: Simplified value chain diagram of a vertically-integrated optical transceiver developer. The developer handles the PIC design, manufacturing, and packaging

However, this approach has its trade-offs. If a vertically-integrated chip developer wants to scale up in volume, they must make a hefty investment in more equipment and personnel to do so. They must develop new fabrication process which not only need money, but also time to develop and train personnel. Especially in the case of an optical transceiver market that is not as big as that of consumer electronics, it’s hard not to wonder whether that initial investment is cost-effective.

Electronics manufacturing had a similar problem during their 1970s boom, with smaller chip start-ups facing almost insurmountable barriers to enter the market because of the massive capital expenditure (CapEx) required. Electronics solved this problem by moving into what we call a fabless model, with companies designing and selling the chips but outsourcing the manufacturing.

For example, transceiver DSP chip developers design the chip, but then outsource the actual fabrication to a large-volume manufacturing plant (usually called a foundry). This business model works by leveraging the design, research, development, and distribution networks of the fabless company, and the specialized manufacturing skill of the chip foundry.

Figure 2: Simplified value chain diagram of a vertically-integrated optical transceiver developer. The developer handles the PIC design, manufacturing, and packaging.

This model reduces the capital expenditure burden on the DSP developers, because instead of spending all the time and energy in scaling up their own facilities, they can work with a foundry that already did that investment and has the required manufacturing volume. In other words, instead going through a more costly, time-consuming process, the troubles of scaling up are outsourced and (from the perspective of the fabless company) become as simple as putting a purchase order in place. Furthermore, the fabless model also allows companies to concentrate their R&D resources on the end market. If photonics is to move into million-scale volumes, this is likely the way forward.

Economies of Scale and Operating Expenses

Even if an optical transceiver developer could move forward with the CapEx required for its own large-scale fab and a vertically-integrated model, market demand and operational expenses become the next pain point. Transceivers are a B2B market, and their demand is significantly smaller than of B2C consumer electronics. For example, LightCounting estimates that 55 million optical transceivers will be sold in 2021, while the International Data Corporation estimates that 1.4 billion smartphones will be sold in 2021. The latter figure is 25 times larger than that of the transceiver market.

The smaller demand of transceivers means that even if a vertically-integrated transceiver developer upgrades to a larger-scale manufacturing facility, it will likely have more manufacturing capacity than what their customers need. In such a situation, the facility could run at a reduced capacity. However, fabs are not only expensive to build, but also to operate. Unless they can be kept at nearly full utilization, operating expenses (OpEx) will become a drain on the finances of the facility owners.

This issue was something the electronics industry faced in the past, during the 1980s. Integrated electronics manufacturers had excess production capacity, and this situation paved the way for the fabless model too. The large-scale manufacturers ended up selling that excess capacity to smaller, fabless chip developers. Ultimately, the entire electronics industry relied increasingly on the fabless model, to the point where pure play foundries like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) appeared and focused entirely on manufacturing for other fabless companies.

In this scenario, everyone ended up winning. The foundries serviced multiple companies and could run their facilities at full capacity, while the fabless companies could outsource manufacturing and reduce their expenditures.

Working with the Best in the Business

The other advantage of pure play foundries is that they not only have state-of-the art equipment but also the best personnel and technical expertise. Even if a vertically-integrated developer transceiver can make the required CapEx to scale up their facilities, developing processes and training people inevitably takes years, delaying the return on investment even further.

By working with an established and experienced foundry, fabless companies take advantage of the highly trained and experience personnel of these facilities. These operators, technicians, and engineers have worked day in, day out with their equipment for years and already developed processes that are finely tuned to their equipment. Thanks to their work, fabless transceiver developers do not have to reinvent the wheel and come up with their own processes, saving valuable time and many, many headaches.

Takeaways

To make transceivers more accessible to world and connect more people together, transceiver developers need to reach production scales in the millions. At EFFECT Photonics, we believe that the way to achieve this goal is by having photonics follow the blueprint laid out by the electronics industry. Using a fabless model, we can reduce the capital expenditure and scale up more quickly and with fewer risks.

Working with a world-class high-volume foundry makes scaling up from low to high volume as easy as putting a purchase order in place. Instead of having to buy equipment, develop processes, and train operators over many years, a fabless photonics developer can leverage foundries who already have these capabilities and knowledge.

Tags: coherent, coherent optics, external foundries, foundries, Integrated Photonics, LightCounting, optical transceivers, photonic integration, Photonics, photonicwafer, pluggables, Transceivers, wafer

Wafer Scale Photonics for a Coherent Future

Insights

January 12, 2022

Wafer Scale Photonics for a Coherent Future

The advances in electronic and optical integration have brought down the size and cost of…

The advances in electronic and optical integration have brought down the size and cost of the coherent transceivers, packing more bits than ever into smaller areas. However, progress in the cost and bandwidth density of transceivers might slow down soon. Electronics has achieved amazing breakthroughs in the last two decades to continue increasing transistor densities and keeping Moore’s Law alive, but these achievements have come at a price. With each new generation of electronic processors, development costs increase and the price per transistor has stagnated.

Figure 1. Evolution of foundry sale price per million transistors over successive electronic process nodes. Based on data from TSMC. Source: AI Chips: What They Are and Why They Matter, Center for Security and Emerging Technology (April 2020).

Due to these developments, electronic digital signal processor (DSP) chips will continue to improve in efficiency and footprint, but their price will stagnate and with it the price of optical transceivers. Without further improvements in the cost per bit, it will be difficult to achieve the goal of making coherent technology more accessible across the entire optical network. This will make it more difficult to provide the device volume and services needed by the growing 5G networks and cloud providers.

To make coherent transceivers more accessible, photonics has to step up now more than ever. With the cost of DSPs stagnating, photonic integration must take the lead in driving down the costs and size of optical transceivers. Integrating all optical components on a single chip makes it easier to scale up in volume, reach these size and cost targets, and ultimately provide faster, more affordable, and sustainable coherent transmission.

Size Matters

Full photonic integration allows us to combine active optical elements like the laser and the amplifer with passive elements, all on the same chip and enclosed in a simple, non-hermetic package. This process enables a much smaller device than combining several indivudally packaged elements. For example, by integrating all photonic functions on a single chip, including lasers and optical amplifiers, EFFECT Photonics’ pluggable transceiver modules can achieve transmit power levels similar to those of line card transponder modules while still keeping the smaller QSFP router pluggable form factor, power consumption, and cost.

Figure 2: Comparing transmit power, noise, size, and cost of line card transponders and different transceiver pluggable modules. Fully integrated QSFP-DD modules include lasers and amplifiers inside a single chip, so they can deliver high transmit powers at small size and low cost.

Full integration technology increases the transmit power by minimizing the optical losses due to the use of more efficient optical modulators, fewer material losses compared to silicon, and the integration of the laser device on the same chip as the rest of the optical components. The semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) used in fully integrated devices can also outperform the performance of micro-EDFAs for transmission distances of at least 80km.

The Economics of Scale

As innovative as full photonic integration can be, it will have little impact if it cannot be manufactured at a high enough volume to satisfy the demands of mobile and cloud providers and drive down the cost per device. Wafer scale photonics manufacturing demands a higher upfront investment, but the resulting high-volume production line drives down the cost per device. This economy-of-scale principle is the same one behind electronics manufacturing, and the same must be applied to photonics.

The more optical components we can integrate into a single chip, the more can the price of each component decrease. The more optical System-on-Chip (SoC) devices can go into a single wafer, the more can the price of each SoC decrease. Researchers at the Technical University of Eindhoven and the JePPIX consortium have done some modelling to show how this economy of scale principle would apply to photonics. If production volumes can increase from a few thousands of chips per year to a few millions, the price per optical chip can decrease from thousands of Euros to mere tens of Euros. This must be the goal for the optical transceiver industry.

Figure 3: Modelling of photonic integrated chip (PIC) cost as a function of aggregate number of PICs produced per year. Exponential increases in production lead to an exponential decrease in cost. Source: Model and graph provided by Prof. Meint Smit, TU Eindhoven.

Full Integration Streamlines Production and Testing

Integrating all optical components on a single chip can make manufacturing and testing more efficient, sustainable, and easier to scale up. The price of photonic devices is not dominated by the manufacturing of the semiconductor chips, but by the device assembly and packaging. Assembling and packaging a device by interconnecting multiple photonic chips together leads to an increase in assembly complexity and therefore additional costs.

This situation happens frequently with the laser component, which is often manufactured on a separate chip and then interconnected to the other optical components which are on another chip. Integrating all components—including the laser—on a single chip shifts the complexity from the assembly process to the much more efficient and scalable semiconductor wafer process. For example, it’s much easier to combine optical components on a wafer at a high-volume than it is to align different chips together in the assembly process, and that drives down the cost of the device.

Testing is another aspect that becomes more efficient and scalable when manufacturing at the wafer level. When faults are found earlier in the testing process, fewer resources and energy are spent in process defective chips. Ideally, testing should happen not only on the final, packaged transceiver but in the earlier stages of PIC fabrication, such as measuring after wafer processing or cutting the wafer into smaller dies.

Figure 4: Package vs. die level testing. Manufacturers can find faults earlier by testing at the die level, which avoids wasting packaging materials.

Full photonic integration enables earlier optical testing on the semiconductor wafer and dies. By testing the dies and wafers directly before packaging, manufacturers need only discard the bad dies rather than the whole package, which saves time, cost, and is more energy efficient and sustainable. For example, EFFECT Photonics reaps these benefits in its production processes. 100% of electrical testing on the PICs happens at the wafer level, and our unique integration technology allows for 90% of optical testing to also happen on the wafer.

Takeaways

Photonics is facing the next stage of its development. There have been many great breakthroughs that have allowed us to take photonic devices from the lab to real-world use cases. However, to have the biggest possible impact in society, we need to manufacture photonic devices at very high volumes to make them accessible to everyone. This requires us to think about production volumes in the scale of millions of units. At EFFECT Photonics, we believe that the way to achieve this goal is by following the blueprint laid out by our friends in the electronics industry. By integrating all optical components on a single chip, we can shift more complexity from the assembly to the wafer, allowing production to scale more efficiently and sustainably. In our next article, we will elaborate on another key factor of the electronics blueprint: the fabless development model.

Tags: coherent, coherent optics, Density, Integrated Photonics, LightCounting, network operators, optical transceivers, photonic integration, Photonics, pluggables, Transceivers, Wafer Scale Photonics

Insights

December 1, 2021

Miniaturization: size and performance matter

Photonic integration will be a disruptive technology that will simplify network design and operation and…

Insights

November 26, 2021

How to Increase Bandwidth Density in Photonics

In the past, optical transceivers were too bulky, too expensive, and not efficient enough, so…

In the past, optical transceivers were too bulky, too expensive, and not efficient enough, so they could only be used for long-haul telecom networks or data centers with massive bandwidth requirements. Electronic and photonic integration broke this paradigm, miniaturizing optical transceivers to the size of a large USB stick and reducing their cost. Through these advances, optical component manufacturers could pack exponentially more bandwidth into a smaller transceiver area within the last decade. Thanks to this exponential progress, component manufacturers managed to keep up with the exponentially-growing worldwide demand for data.

*Figure 1: Exponential growth of bandwidth density over time through the evolution of types of transceiver module standards.*

However, the next wave of innovative network services—autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0—demands even more bandwidth and other requirements. Optical links that connect 5G controller units to the rest of the network must upscale from 10G to 100G. The links from metro networks to datacenters must upscale from 100G to 400G or 800G, and the links within datacenters must operate at Terabit speeds. These services require not only more bandwidth but also lower latencies and more reliability. Further electronic integration cannot keep up by itself; photonic integration must also continue pushing the envelope on bandwidth density.

In our previous articles and videos, we have already discussed one way to increase the bandwidth density through coherent transmission. Coherent technology can pack more bits into a laser signal because it encodes data in the laser light’s amplitude, phase, and polarization. The use of digital signal processing in these devices improves the reach and bandwidth of the signal even further. Coherent transmission allows network operators to reach higher bandwidths without upgrading their existing optical fiber infrastructure. Conserving and reusing existing fiber infrastructure is also a sustainability measure because it avoids spending additional energy and resources on manufacturing more fiber and laying it down on the roads.

However, another way to improve the bandwidth density is by moving to full photonic integration. Let’s use an analogy from electronics to explain what this means.

*Figure 2: Example of integrating a laser to other photonic components through different integration approaches.*

Before 2020, Apple made its computer processors with discrete components. In other words, electronic components were manufactured on separate chips, and then these chips were assembled into a single package. However, the interconnections between the different chips produced losses and incompatibilities that made the device less efficient. After 2020, starting with Apple’s M1 processor, they now fully integrate all components on a single chip, making the device more energy efficient and reducing its footprint.

Full photonic integration achieves something similar to Apple’s approach, but with optical components instead of electronic components. By integrating all optical elements required for optical transmission (lasers, detectors, modulators, etc.) into a single System-on-Chip (SoC), we can minimize the losses and reduce the chip’s footprint, transmitting more bits over the same chip area. Furthermore, as we discussed in a previous article, a fully integrated system-on-chip reduces materials wastage while at the same time ensuring increased energy efficiency of the manufacturing, packaging, and testing process.

Coherent transmission and full photonic integration approaches must synergize to achieve the highest possible bandwidth density. For example, EFFECT Photonics taped out a fully-integrated coherent optical System-on-Chip (SoC) last year. This device can push hundreds of Gigabits per second within a chip that fits inside your fingertip, and we want to turn this breakthrough into a world-class coherent product. We believe it is the next step in packing exponentially more data into optical chips, allowing the world to keep up with the exponential increase in data for years to come.

In the coming weeks, we will discuss more photonic integration and how to implement it in larger volumes to make coherent transmission more widespread around the world.

Tags: bandwidth, coherent, coherent optics, Density, fiber networks, increase bandwidth density, Integrated Photonics, LightCounting, network operators, optical transceivers, photonic integration, Photonics, pluggables, Transceivers

Insights

November 24, 2021

Direct Detection or Coherent? EFFECT Photonics explains

Direct Detection and Coherent: what is the difference between these technologies? What are their benefits…

Direct Detection and Coherent: what is the difference between these technologies? What are their benefits and limitations?

In the following video, we give a short explanation about these two technologies.

Firstly and foremost, Direct Detect and Coherent use different levels of information.

Direct Detection works by changing the amplitude of the light to transmit information. In this case, the achievable transmission distance depends on the speed of the data signal: at lower data rates, the transmission distance is more than 100 km, but as the speed increase, it exponentially gets shorter.

Coherent Optical Transmission uses three different properties of light: amplitude, phase, and polarization. This way, it is possible to increase the speed of the data signal, without compromising the transmission distance. With Coherent, it is possible to transmit information across long distances with very high data rates enabling operators to upgrade their networks without replacing the physical fiber infrastructure in the ground.

About EFFECT Photonics

EFFECT Photonics delivers highly integrated optical communications products based on its Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) optical System-on-Chip technology. The key enabling technology for DWDM systems is full monolithic integration of all photonic components within a single chip and being able to produce these in volume with high yield at low cost. With this capability, EFFECT Photonics is addressing the need for low cost DWDM solutions driven by the soaring demand for high bandwidth connections between datacentres and back from mobile cell towers. EFFECT Photonics is headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with additional R&D and manufacturing in South West UK, and a facility opening soon in the US.

http://www.effectphotonics.com

Tags: coherent, Coherent Detection, Direct Detect, Direct Detection, Integrated Photonics, Optical Coherent Technology, Optical Communication, optical networking, optical technology

Industrial Hardening: Coherent Goes Outdoors

Insights

October 26, 2021

Industrial Hardening: Coherent Goes Outdoors

The global optical transceiver market is expected to double in size by 2026, and coherent…

The global optical transceiver market is expected to double in size by 2026, and coherent pluggables will play a significant role in this growth as they will constitute roughly a third of those sales. While coherent is now an established solution in data center interconnects and long haul networks, it is also expected to start gaining ground in the access networks that connect mobile base stations and their controllers to the rest of the Internet. LightCounting forecasts that by 2025, coherent modules will generate 19% of all sales revenue, in an estimated market of $827 million, for transceivers in back-, mid-, and front-haul network segments. This is an increase in market share from 6% in 2021, as operators are expected to replace some of their direct detect modules with coherent ones in the coming years.

*Figure 1: Transceiver sales revenue (in USD) forecast for coherent modules in back/mid/front-haul network segments. Source: LightCounting Access Optics Market Forecast – November 2020.*

The numbers for coherent sales will only increase in the coming decade for two main reasons. First, electronic and photonic integration are making coherent pluggables economically viable and smaller (see one of our previous article on the subject). Second, the increasing data demands require access networks to increase their capacity beyond what direct detect can deliver. However, for coherent devices to become established in access networks, they must learn to live outdoors.

Controlled vs. uncontrolled environments

Coherent devices have traditionally lived in the controlled environments of data center machine rooms or network provider equipment rooms. These rooms have active temperature control, cooling systems, filters for dust and other particulates, airlocks, and humidity control. In these rooms, pluggable transceivers operate at a relatively stable temperature of around 50ºC, and they only need to survive in ambient temperatures within the commercial temperature range (C-temp) of 0 to 70ºC.

*Figure 2: Temperature ratings required across different segments of a 5G network.*

On the other hand, access networks feature uncontrolled outdoor environments at Mother Nature’s mercy and whims. It could be at the top of an antenna, on mountain ranges, inside traffic tunnels, or in the harsh winters of Northern Europe. Deployments at higher altitudes present additional problems. The air becomes less dense, so networking equipment cooling mechanisms don’t work as efficiently, so the device cannot tolerate case temperatures as high as it does at sea level. Transceivers should operate in the industrial temperature (I-temp) range of -40 to 85ºC degrees for these environments. Optics are also available in the extended temperature (e-temp) range, which can operate as hot as I-temp devices (85ºC) but cannot get any colder than -20ºC.

*Table 1: Comparing the temperature ranges of different temperature hardening standards, including industrial and automotive/full military applications*

The initial investment has a longer-term payoff

An expensive challenge for a network operator is having a product that cannot perform reliably in the uncontrolled environments of 5G deployments. With more bandwidth and computing power moving towards the network edges, coherent transceivers must endure potentially extreme conditions in outside environments. Since i-temp transceivers are more robust, they will survive for longer, and operators will ultimately buy fewer of them compared to c-temp modules. Therefore, the initial, somewhat more expensive investment in I-temp transceivers will pay off in the long run.

In addition, the growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications makes reliability even more important. A network connection drop could be disastrous in many critical and business services, such as medical and self-driving car applications.

The importance of standards

Making an I-temp transceiver means that every internal component—the integrated circuits, lasers, photodetectors—must also be I-temp compliant. EFFECT Photonics has already developed I-temp pluggable transceivers with direct detection, so we understand what standards must be followed to develop temperature-hardened coherent devices.

For example, our optical transceivers comply with the Telcordia GR-468 qualification, which describes how to test optoelectronic devices for reliability under extreme conditions. Our manufacturing facilities include capabilities for the temperature cycling and reliability testing needed to match Telcordia standards, such as temperature cycling ovens and chambers with humidity control.

*Figure 3: Examples of necessary verification tests for transceivers that will operate in harsh temperatures*

EFFECT Photonics transceivers also comply with the SFF-8472 standard that describes the Digital Diagnostics Monitoring (DDM) required for temperature-hardened transceivers to compensate for temperature fluctuations. Our proprietary NarroWave technology even allows network operators to read such device diagnostics remotely, avoiding additional truck rolls to check the devices on the field. These remote diagnostics give operators a full view of the entire network’s health from the central office.

Takeaways: going from Direct-Detect to Coherent I-temp

One of our central company objectives is to bring the highest-performing optical technologies, such as coherent detection, all the way to the network edge. However, achieving this goal doesn’t just require us to focus on the optical or electronic side but also on meeting the mechanical and temperature reliability standards required to operate coherent devices outdoors. Fortunately, EFFECT Photonics can take advantage of its previous experience and knowledge in I-temp qualification for direct-detect devices as it prepares its new coherent product line.

If you would like to download this article as a PDF, then please click here.

Tags: access networks, coherent, coherent optics, commercial temperature, fiber networks, I-temp, industrial temperature, Integrated Photonics, LightCounting, NarroWave, network operators, optical transceivers, photonic integration, Photonics, pluggables, Transceivers

Insights

October 21, 2021

Optical System-on-Chip: Bringing Scalable and Affordable DWDM to the Edges of the Network

While electrical System-on-Chips have been around for some time, EFFECT Photonics is the first company…

While electrical System-on-Chips have been around for some time, EFFECT Photonics is the first company in the world to introduce a full optical System-on-Chip – combining all the optical elements needed for optical networking onto a single die.

EFFECT Photonics’ System-on-Chip technology focuses on dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), which is regarded as an important innovation in optical networks. DWDM is scalable, transparent and enables provision of high-bandwidth services. It is the technology of choice for many networking applications today. Using many different wavelengths of light to route data makes these systems more efficient, flexible, and cost-effective to build, own, and operate compared to single-channel, point-to-point links. Thanks to our high-density electrical interconnect and packaging technology, the optical System-on-Chip can be assembled for volume manufacture at a low cost.

In this short animation, we show you how EFFECT Photonics takes a platform approach to designing optical System-on-Chips using our extensive library of experimentally verified optical building blocks. This library contains all the optical components needed to build a monolithically integrated optical engine. By combining different building blocks, our photonic integrated circuit (PIC) designers create a new optical System-on-Chip that can be used in the next-generation optical transceivers we are developing. This System-on-Chip is then combined with simple packaging to deliver highly integrated optical communication products.

About EFFECT Photonics

EFFECT Photonics delivers highly integrated optical communications products based on its Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) optical System-on-Chip technology. The key enabling technology for DWDM systems is full monolithic integration of all photonic components within a single chip and being able to produce these in volume with high yield at low cost. With this capability, EFFECT Photonics is addressing the need for low cost DWDM solutions driven by the soaring demand for high bandwidth connections between datacentres and back from mobile cell towers. EFFECT Photonics is headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with additional R&D and manufacturing in South West UK, and a facility opening soon in the US. http://www.effectphotonics.com

Tags: DWDM, Integrated Photonics, optical networking, optical technology, photonic integrated chip, photonic integration, PIC, programmable optical system-on-chip

Insights

September 14, 2021

Introducing our new Coherent Product Line Manager – Vladi Veljanovski

Last year, EFFECT Photonics taped out the world’s first fully integrated coherent optical transceiver chip.…

Last year, EFFECT Photonics taped out the world’s first fully integrated coherent optical transceiver chip. We are now ready to turn this engineering breakthrough into a product. To lead this process, EFFECT Photonics has hired Vladimir Veljanovski as our first Coherent Product Line Manager. To give you more insight into our new colleague and what drives him, we asked him a few questions.

Tell us a little more about yourself and your background

I was born in Macedonia and moved to Germany for my university studies, graduating in 2006 with an Engineering degree in Communication and Information Technology from the Technical University in Munich. I did my master thesis with the R&D department of Siemens Fixed Networks (later Coriant) and started working there after graduation. I started my job by simulating optical transmission systems and extracting system design rules. Soon after, I moved to the lab, which definitely attracted me more as it was closer to reality and work done on the field.

Around that time, we started testing our first 40G coherent product in the lab. Coherent was a major technology change, and customers were struggling to believe and buy into it. Hence, R&D needed to go to the customers and demonstrate the new technology. That’s when I discovered my preference for working closer to the customers. I remained in this customer-facing role until 2014, doing lots of introductory work for coherent technology in terrestrial and submarine networks. In 2014, I moved to Switzerland to work for Huawei in a technical sales role as the Sales Project Manager responsible for the Swisscom transport network. In four exciting years there, we renewed the network by introducing 200G and 400G coherent products into the network backbone and 100G coherent into the metro network.

After the Huawei experience, I wanted more of a network-level overview, which was hard to get when working with the network of a telecom carrier. Thus, I spent the next two years working in the enterprise environment. The company was smaller and more easily manageable. There I could see the whole network as an entity, not just the optics but also the switching, the firewalls, the network management, etc. And in June 2021, I joined EFFECT Photonics. I am thrilled with this transition, even though we have a lot of work to bring the product out as soon as possible.

What do you find exciting about coherent technology?

Coherent technology is not new. It has been around for a while. However, it is incredible that now those complicated benchtop systems I built in the lab back in 2009, with all the discrete components that were cumbersome to connect, can now fit into something the size of a sugar cube thanks to photonic integration. And these systems even have better performance than back then. You see that progress and think, “man, that’s awesome!”.

Coherent technology was reserved for premium long-distance links where performance is everything. Metro and access networks could not use this higher-performance technology since on the one hand, it was too bulky and expensive, and on the other, the bandwidth demand was yet to grow.

Photonic integration technology like EFFECT’ Photonics’ helped bring these big, proprietary, and expensive systems into a router pluggable form factor. This tech has squeezed more performance into a smaller area and at lower power consumption, making the device more cost-effective. Photonic integration will be a disruptive technology that will simplify network design and operation and reduce the capital and operating expenses of network operators.

What do you find exciting about working at EFFECT Photonics?

I love working with smart people with a good team spirit. I get to study and learn new things, and I continue to grow and challenge myself, which makes all the work even more fun.

I figured out that by working at EFFECT Photonics, I would be surrounded by great professionals who have worked on photonic integration for ten years or more and know and identify with this technology very well. It’s a fascinating and challenging environment for me to be in.

On that note, photonic integration technology was a big reason why I chose to work at EFFECT Photonics. I was amazed to see how a company of this size, with relatively few people, can work on such a potentially disruptive technology. I get to work on new and exciting technology, and at the same time, I can get to know almost everyone in the company. I clearly feel the “scale-up winds” blowing in my daily work.

Having worked in both R&D and sales of coherent products with network carriers and enterprise providers, Vladi possesses deep insight into coherent technology itself and how to sell it to customers. At EFFECT Photonics, we are excited to work with him, and we look forward to what he can do to turn our technology into a fantastic coherent product.

Tags: coherent, Integrated Photonics, photonic integration

Insights

September 1, 2021

EFFECT Photonics Senior Management Team Complete

EFFECT Photonics is pleased to announce the completion of its leadership team with the recent…

EFFECT Photonics is pleased to announce the completion of its leadership team with the recent hiring of Roberto Marcoccia in the position of Chief Development & Strategy Officer as part of the growth and expansion journey of the company. This follows the appointment of Dr. Sophie De Maesschalck as Chief Financial Officer, and Harald Graber as Chief Commercial Officer last year. Based in California, Roberto joins EFFECT Photonics with over 20 years of leadership experience in optical communications product development. Most recently he was Vice President Engineering at Juniper Networks responsible for leading and executing many of the company’s optical strategies. Prior to Juniper, Roberto was the founding leader at StrataLight Communications responsible all aspects of development including StrataLight’s long haul DWDM products that were deployed in networks around the world and the successful acquisition of StrataLight by Opnext. At EFFECT Photonics, Roberto will lead and grow the global development organization and drive the advancement and execution of the growth strategy. “I’m absolutely delighted to have joined the EFFECT Photonics team. We are in a unique position to leverage the power of integrated photonics and our vertically integrated capabilities to meet the massive shifts happening in the industry with the evolution of 5G and large-scale computation moving to the edge of the network. It’s an exciting time for the industry and the company, and I look forward to working closely with James and the rest of the senior leadership team to capitalize on the many opportunities before us.” – Roberto Marcoccia Sophie is an experienced technology scale-up CFO with over 15 years’ experience in technology incubation, international financing, and mergers and acquisitions. She has been Managing Partner at Incubaid, an incubator based in Belgium where she supported a portfolio of start-ups in the field of storage, virtualization and decentralization, several of which were exited to large, international corporations. She started her career at Bain & Company. With her PhD in optical telecommunications and her financial experience, Sophie is perfectly placed to help EFFECT Photonics scale up the finance infrastructure, drive the expansion strategy and manage the equity financing rounds. “I am thrilled to be part of this amazing team at EFFECT Photonics. Over the last months, we have made tremendous progress and we have welcomed our new Series-C investors on board. Now we have strengthened our senior management team and with the trust and support of our investors, I’m convinced EFFECT photonics has a bright future ahead and we can truly make a difference with our ground-breaking technology ” – Sophie De Maesschalck During his more than 20 years in optical networking, Harald has held different senior leadership roles, one of the last was as Vice President Customer Innovation – Product & Solution Marketing at Coriant. Prior to that he lived and worked in Europe as well as the US and China for Lucent Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks. In his role as CCO at EFFECT Photonics, he is responsible for leading the global sales, product line management, marketing communications teams as well as building the underlying infrastructure to serve the growing global customer base. “Joining EFFECT Photonics has been one of the most rewarding decisions so far. The team is driven to make a huge impact in the world of semiconductors and telecommunication. With the completion of the senior management team we also have formulated a clear path to excel in the market and further deepen our technological competence in the most critical fields. It is great to see our customers and partners joining us in discussions about the future and formulating breakthrough developments.” – Harald Graber The senior management team now comprises of:

James Regan – Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Boudewijn Docter – President & co-founder
Tim Koene – Chief Technology Officer & co-founder
Dr. Paul Rosser – Chief Operations Officer
Harald Graber – Chief Commercial Officer
Roberto Marcoccia – Chief Development & Strategy Officer
Dr. Sophie De Maesschalck – Chief Financial Officer

“We now have the world-class leadership team we need to realize the ambition that we have for our existing and next gen product portfolios. These are exciting times for us as we further scale up our R&D and production efforts as well as expanding our geographic footprint.” – James Regan For more information on the senior management team, please click here. Tags: #expansion, #invest, #leadership, Integrated Photonics, Photonics

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August 30, 2021

An Introduction to Quantum Key Distribution

While the word “quantum” has only started trending in the technology space during the last…

While the word “quantum” has only started trending in the technology space during the last decade, many past technologies already relied on our understanding of the quantum world, from lasers to MRI imaging, electronic transistors, and nuclear power. The reason quantum has become so popular lately is that researchers have become increasingly better at manipulating individual quantum particles (light photons, electrons, atoms) in ways that weren’t possible before. These advances allow us to harness more explicitly the unique and weird properties of the quantum world. They could launch yet another quantum technology revolution in areas like sensing, computation, and communication.

What’s a Quantum Computer?

The power of quantum computers comes chiefly from the superposition principle. A classical bit can only be in a 0 or 1 state, while a quantum bit (qubit) can exist in several 0 and 1 state combinations. When one measures and observes the qubit, it will collapse into just one of these combinations. Each combination has a specific probability of occurring when the qubit collapses.

While two classical bits can only exist in one out of four combinations, two quantum bits can exist in all these combinations simultaneously before being observed. Therefore, these qubits can hold more information than a classical bit, and the amount of information they can hold grows exponentially with each additional qubit. Twenty qubits can already hold a million values simultaneously (2²⁰), and 300 qubits can store as many particles as there are in the universe (2³⁰⁰).

Figure 1: Classical bits in 0 or 1 state vs. a qubit in a superposition of |0> and |1> states.

However, to harness this potential processing power, we must understand that probabilities in quantum mechanics do not work like conventional probabilities. The probability we learned about in school allowed only for numbers between 0 and 1. On the other hand, probabilities in quantum mechanics behave as waves with amplitudes that can be positive or negative. And just like waves, quantum probabilities can interfere, reinforcing each other or cancelling each other out.

Figure 2: Quantum computation as an interference process. The quantum circuit processes all the potential possibilities, canceling out the wrong solution and reinforcing the correct solution. [Source: Qiskit]

Quantum computers solve computational problems by harnessing such interference. The quantum algorithm choreographs a pattern of interference where the combinations leading to a wrong answer cancel each other out. In contrast, the combinations leading to the correct answer reinforce each other. This process gives the computer a massive speed boost. We only know how to create such interference patterns for particular computational problems, so for most problems, a quantum computer will only be as fast as a conventional computer. However, one problem where quantum computers are much faster than classical ones is finding the prime factors of very large numbers.

How Quantum Computers Threaten Conventional Cryptography

Today’s digital society depends heavily on securely transmitting and storing data. One of the oldest and most widely used methods to encrypt data is called RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman – the surnames of the algorithm’s designers). RSA protocols encrypt messages with a key that results from the multiplication of two very large numbers. Only someone who knows the values of these two numbers can decode the message.

RSA security relies on a mathematical principle: multiplying two large numbers is computationally easy, but the opposite process—figuring out what large numbers were multiplied—is extremely hard, if not practically impossible, for a conventional computer. However, in 1994 mathematician Peter Shor proved that an ideal quantum computer could find the prime factors of large numbers exponentially more quickly than a conventional computer and thus break RSA encryption within hours or days.

While practical quantum computers are likely decades away from implementing Shor’s algorithm with enough performance and scale to break RSA or similar encryption methods, the potential implications are terrifying for our digital society and our data safety.

In combination with private key systems like AES, RSA encrypts most of the traffic on the Internet. Breaking RSA means that emails, online purchases, medical records, company data, and military information, among many others, would all be more susceptible to attacks from malicious third parties. Quantum computers could also crack the digital signatures that ensure the integrity of updates to apps, browsers, operating systems, and other software, opening a path for malware.

This security threat has led to heavy investments in new quantum-resistant encryption. Besides, existing private key systems used in the enterprise telecom sector like AES-256 are already quantum resistant. However, even if these methods are secure now, there is no guarantee that they will remain secure in the future. Someone might discover a way to crack them, just as it happened with RSA.

Quantum Key Distribution and its Impact on the Telecom World

Given these risks, arguably the most secure way to protect data and communications is by fighting quantum with quantum:protect your data from quantum computer hacking by using security protocols that harness the power of quantum physics laws. That’s what quantum key distribution (QKD) does: QKD uses qubits to generate a secret cryptographic key protected by the phenomenon of quantum state collapse. If an attacker tries to eavesdrop and learn information about the key, they will distort the qubits irreversibly. The sender and receiver will see this distortion as errors in their qubit measurements and know that their key has been compromised.

Figure 3: Example of a communications link encrypted via QKD. [Source: TU Eindhoven]

Quantum-safe encryption will take part in people’s day-to-day lives through upgrades to laptops, phones, browsers, and other consumer products. However, most of the burden for quantum-safe communication will be handled by businesses, governments, and cloud service providers that must design and install these systems. It’s a hugely complex change that’s on par with upgrading internet communications from IPv4 to IPv6.

Even if practical quantum computers are not yet available, it’s essential to begin investing in these changes, as explained by Toshiba Chief Digital Officer Taro Shimada: “Sectors such as finance, health and government are now realizing the need to invest in technology that will prepare and protect them for the quantum economy of the future. Our business plan goes far deeper and wider than selling quantum cryptographic hardware. We are developing a quantum platform and services that will not only deliver quantum keys and a quantum network but ultimately enable the birth of a quantum internet”. Toshiba expects the QKD market to grow to approximately $20 billion worldwide in FY 2035.

How Photonics Impacts QKD

Qubits can be photons, electrons, atoms, or any other system that can exist in a quantum state. However, using photons as qubits will likely dominate the quantum communications and QKD application space. We have decades of experience manipulating the properties of photons, such as polarization and phase, to encode qubits. Thanks to optical fiber, we also know how to send photons over long distances with relatively little loss. Besides, optical fiber is already a fundamental component of modern telecommunication networks, so future quantum networks can run on that existing fiber infrastructure. All these signs point towards a new era of quantum photonics.

Photonic QKD devices have been, in some shape or form, commercially available for over 15 years. Still, factors such as the high cost, large size, and the inability to operate over longer distances have slowed their widespread adoption. Many R&D efforts regarding quantum photonics aim to address the size, weight, and power (SWaP) limitations. One way to overcome these limitations and reduce the cost per device would be to integrate every QKD function—generating, manipulating, and detecting photonic qubits—into a single chip.

The further development of the integrated quantum photonics (IQP) chip is considered by many as a critical step in building the platform that will unlock quantum applications in much the same way as integrated circuits transformed microelectronics. In the coming articles, we will discuss more how to combine photonic integration with quantum technologies to address the challenges in quantum communications. If you would like to download this article as a PDF, then please see below.

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Tags: PIC, QKD, quantum computing, quantum encryption, Quantum Key Distribution, quantum photonics

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