Photonics Archives - Page 8 of 11

Insights

March 15, 2022

Why Greener Transceivers are Profitable

Thanks to the incredible progress in energy-saving technologies (hyperscale datacenters, photonic and electronic integration), the…

Thanks to the incredible progress in energy-saving technologies (hyperscale datacenters, photonic and electronic integration), the exponential growth in data traffic for the next ten years will not lead to an exponential growth in ICT energy consumption. A 2020 study by Huawei Technologies estimates that from 2020 to 2030, global data traffic will grow 14 times while ICT energy consumption will just increase 1.5 times. Telecom operators, customers, employees, and investors are all paying more attention to sustainability.

A study commissioned by Vertiv surveyed 501 telecom enterprises worldwide, and 24% of them thought that energy efficiency should be their first priority when deploying 5G networks, while 16% saw it as their second priority. People are more likely to work for and buy products from companies with clear and ambitious sustainability goals. Investors and shareholders demand risk premiums from assets that underperform on climate goals, which often happens with fossil fuel companies. Such risk premiums could carry over to the telecom and datacom sectors. Sustainability is no longer just a matter of corporate social responsibility; it has real financial consequences.

Figure 1: Survey of 501 telecom enterprises worldwide about their priorities when deploying 5G networks. Commissioned by Vertiv and conducted by consulting firm STL Partners on January 2021.

However, there’s even more to the sustainability story. The telecom and datacom industries should become more sustainable not just because investors and customers like it, but also because it can lead to affordable ways to scale up capacity. After all, sustainable systems are efficient systems that are often smaller, more affordable, and require less energy spending. In this article, we will dive into one of an example of this trend by explaining how compact, fully-integrated optical transceivers can play an essential role in transitioning towards a greener and more affordable telecom infrastructure.

Telecom Equipment Dissipates Heat…and Money

Data centers and 5G networks might be hot commodities, but the infrastructure that enables them runs even hotter. Electronic equipment generates plenty of heat, and the more heat energy an electronic device dissipates, the more money and energy must be spent to cool it down. The Uptime Institute estimates that the average power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio for data centers in 2020 is 1.58.

This number means that, on average, every 1 kWh required to power ICT equipment needs an additional 0.58 kWh for auxiliary equipment such as lighting and especially cooling. Datacenter PUE will decrease in the coming decade thanks to the emergence of hyperscale data centers, but the exponential increase of data traffic and 5G services also means that more data centers must be built too, especially on the network edges. For all the bad reputation that datacenters receive for their energy consumption, wireless transmission generates even more heat than wired links. While 5G standards are more energy-efficient per bit than 4G, the total power consumption will be much higher than 4G. Huawei expects that the maximum power consumption of one of their 5G base stations will be 68% higher than their 4G stations.

To make things worse, the use of higher frequency spectrum bands and new Internet-of-Things use cases requires the deployment of more base stations too. Prof. Earl McCune from TU Delft estimates that nine out of ten watts of electrical power in 5G systems turn into heat. This issue is why the Huawei also expects that the energy consumption of wireless access networks will increase even more quickly than that of data centers in the next ten years—more than quadrupling between 2020 and 2030.

Graph-estimated-electric-power — Figure 2: Comparison of estimated ICT electric power consumption in 2020 and 2030, divided by different ICT sectors. Source: Anders Andrae (Huawei), 2020.

These issues do not just affect the environment but also the bottom lines of communications companies. McKinsey reports that by the end of 2018, energy costs already represented 5% of operating expenditures for telecom operators. These costs will increase even further with the exponential growth of traffic and the deployment of 5G networks.

Compactness Makes Integrated Photonics Cool

Decreasing energy consumption and costs requires more efficient equipment, and a key to achieving this goal is to increase the use of photonics and miniaturization. Photonics has several properties that improve energy efficiency. Light transmitted over an optical fiber can carry more data faster and over longer distances than electric signals over wires, while dissipating less heat. Due to their longer reach, optical signals also save power compared to electrical signals by reducing the number of times the signal needs regeneration.

Photonics can also play a key role in rethinking the architecture of data centers. Photonics enables a more decentralized system of datacentres with branches in different geographical areas connected through high-speed optical fiber links to cope with the strain of data center clusters on power grids.

For example, data centers can relocate to areas where spare power capacity is available, preferably from nearby renewable energy sources. Efficiency can increase further by sending data to branches with spare capacity. The Dutch government has already proposed this kind of decentralization as part of their spatial strategy for data centers.

Figure 3: High-speed fiber-optic connections allow data processing and storage to be moved to locations where excess (green) energy is available. Data can be moved elsewhere if power is needed for other purposes, such as charging electric vehicles.

As we have explained in previous articles, miniaturization of telecom technology can also improve energy efficiency and affordability. For example, over the last decade coherent optical systems have been miniaturized from big, expensive line cards to small pluggables the size of a large USB stick. These compact transceivers with highly integrated optics and electronics have shorter interconnections, fewer losses, and more elements per chip area. These features all lead to a reduced power consumption over the last decade, as shown in the figure below.

Figure 4: Coherent module size and power consumption evolution from OIF MSA line card modules to pluggable modules like CFP and QSFP.

Transceivers can decrease their energy consumption further by using an optical System-On-Chip (SoC). The SoC integrates all photonic functions on a single chip, including lasers and amplifiers. This full integration leads to simpler and more efficient interconnections between optical elements, which leads to lower losses and heat dissipation. Optical SoCs also allow coherent transceivers to have a similar reach to line card transponders for use cases up to 400G, so the industry does not have to choose between size and performance anymore.

Wafer Scale Processes Make Integrated Photonics Affordable

Previously, deploying coherent technology required investing in large and expensive transponder equipment on both sides of the optical link. The rise of integrated photonics has not only reduced the footprint and energy consumption of coherent transceivers but also their cost. The economics of scale principles that rule the semiconductor industry reduce the cost of optical SoCs and the transceivers that use them. SoCs minimize the footprint of the optics, allowing transceiver developers to fit more optics within a single wafer, which decreases the price of each individual optical system. As the graphic below shows, the more chips and wafers are produced, the lower the cost per chip becomes.

Figure 5: 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.

Integrating all optical components—including the laser—on a single chip shifts the complexity from the expensive assembly and packaging process to the more affordable 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 components from different chips together in the assembly process. This shift to wafer processes also helps drives down the cost of the device.

Takeaways

Pluggable transceivers with compact, highly-integrated optics are more energy efficient and therefore save money in network operational expenditures such as cooling. They can even lead to datacenter architectures that make the most out of the existing electricity and processing resources, allowing cloud providers to make the most of their big infrastructure investments.

By integrating all the optical components in a single SoC, more of them can fit on a single wafer and scale up to higher production volumes. Thanks to the economics of scale, higher volume production leads to lower sales prices, which reduces operators’ capital expenditures too. Due to all the reasons described above, it should now be clear why these greener pluggable transceivers will become a key factor in the successful and profitable deployment of coherent technology in future access networks.

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Tags: green, green transceivers, Integrated Photonics, optical transceivers, photonic integration, Photonics, pluggables, Transceivers, tuneability

Insights

February 10, 2022

Remote PHY, a new architecture for fixed access networks

Cable networks, just like any other telecom network in the world, had to adapt to…

Cable networks, just like any other telecom network in the world, had to adapt to the rising demand for data. During the 90s and 00s, these requirements led to the rise of hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) networks: optical fibers travel from the cable company hub and terminate into optical nodes, while coaxial cable connects the last few hundreds of meters from the optical node to nearby houses. These connections mainly were asymmetric, with customers having several times more bandwidth to download data than to upload.

In the past decade, the way we use the Internet has changed. With the rise of social media, online gaming, video calls, and independent content creation such as video blogging, users need more upstream bandwidth than ever. These new requirements have led to quick progress in the DOCSIS standards that regulate data transmission over coaxial cables. For example, the latest DOCSIS 4.0 standards allow full-duplex transmission with symmetrical upstream and downstream channels. Meanwhile, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) systems—with fiber arriving directly to the customer premises—are also becoming widespread and allowing Gigabit connections that are faster than HFC networks.

Despite these upgrades in the transport mediums and standards, cable networks have experienced surprisingly few upgrades in their architectures. They still rely on centralized architectures in which the network operator’s headend performs almost all functionalities of both the physical layer (PHY) and medium access control layer (MAC). This means that the headend must modulate and demodulate data, convert between analog and digital, perform error corrections, provide cable modem termination system (CMTS) services, and do some resource allocation and flow control.

However, as traffic demands grow, cable providers need to deliver more and more bandwidth to their optical nodes and customer premises. The headend equipment is getting more congested, consuming more power, and running out of ports to handle more fiber connections. This solution centralized on the headend is struggling to scale up with increased demand. As it often happens in the telecom sector, operators need to figure out ways to deliver more bandwidth to more customers without spending significantly more money.

The multiple benefits of distributed access architectures

These issues are the reason why cable providers are moving into distributed access architectures (DAA) that can spread functionalities across access network nodes and reduce the port congestion and equipment required at the headend. Remote PHY has become increasingly popular among providers because it separates the PHY layer from the traditional cable headend and pushes its functions (such as modulation or digital-analog conversion) into the optical fiber access nodes of the network.

This shift can enhance the performance, capacity, and reliability of fixed access networks by using more digital transmission. It also reduces the complexity and power consumption of the headend, which previously translated into higher costs due to the required cooling.

Furthermore, separating PHY and MAC layers makes it easier to virtualize headends and their network functions, which significantly cuts expenses due to the use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment compared to more specialized equipment. Virtualization also allows deploying new services and applications more quickly to users and migrating workloads to optimize power consumption and reduce energy costs. On top of that, Remote PHY achieves all of these benefits while keeping the existing HFC infrastructure!

Figure 1: Comparison between traditional centralized architecture and Remote PHY architecture. The analog fiber link between cable headend and node is replaced by a digital link. The digital-to-analog conversion is moved from the cable headend in a centralized architecture to the Remote PHY node. In this new architecture, the new cable headend is called “CCAP Core”, as it doesn’t perform all the functions of a traditional Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) anymore.

Distributing digital-analog conversion

One of the most significant upgrades provided by Remote PHY networks is digital transmission deeper into the access network. In Remote PHY, data and video signals are kept in a digital format beyond the core headend, all the way into the upgraded optical node, where the signal is then converted into analog RF format. The fiber links between the headend and the access node that were previously analog will become digital fiber connections over Ethernet.

Since digital signals are more noise-tolerant than analog signals, the network benefits from this increased digital transmission length. Analog and radiofrequency signals now travel smaller distances to reach customer premises, so the signal accumulates less noise and boosts its signal-to-noise ratio. This improvement potentially allows the delivery of higher bandwidth signals to customers, including an increase in upstream bandwidth. Furthermore, the reliability of the link between the headend and the new optical node increases due to the greater robustness of digital links. These advances in reliability and performance make digital optics more affordable to buy and maintain than analog optics, reducing the costs for the network operators.

Let’s provide a very simplified example of how it all comes together. A network operator wants to increase their bandwidth and serve more customers, but their traditional centralized headend is already crowded with eight analog optical fiber links of 1Gbps each. There is no room to upgrade.

By installing Remote PHY technology in both the headend and the node, those analog links can be replaced by higher-capacity 10G digital links. The increased capacity at the headend allows for more optical node splits, while the new digital-to-analog conversion capability of the nodes allows them to care of more coaxial splits, all to serve new areas and customers.

Using DWDM in Remote PHY

The tremendous progress in electronic and photonic integration made Dense Wavelength Division Multiplex (DWDM) technology affordable and available to access networks, and this technology is quickly becoming a workhorse in this network domain. The availability of affordable DWDM transceivers made the deployment of Remote PHY even more powerful.

With Remote PHY improving the capacity of the headend, cable access networks had more bandwidth to serve more customers. However, some ways of using that bandwidth are more efficient than others. Operators can do extra node splits for customers by using their dark fibers and more grey transceivers, but that solution doesn’t scale in so cost-effectively due to the installation and maintenance of a new fiber link. Another option is time division multiplexing (TDM), which multiplexes the data of different node channels into specific time slots. This solution allows operators to carry different node channels in a single fiber but has speed, latency, and security trade-offs. A single time-multiplexed channel cannot transmit at the same speed and latency as a dedicated channel, and the data of all node channels are in the same multiplexed optical link, so the nodes and their customers can’t have fully secure channels to themselves.

DWDM solutions, on the other hand, can avoid the speed and security trade-offs by multiplexing extra channels into different wavelengths of light. Instead of several TDM channels “splitting” the 10G bandwidth among themselves, the DWDM channels can each transmit at 10G. And since each WDM channel has its own wavelength, the channels are transmitted independently from each other, allowing users to have secure channels.

Without sharing an optical link as in TDM, DWDM channels can also provide bidirectional communication (upstream and downstream) with less electronic processing than TDM channels. This feature is particularly beneficial for the modern Internet consumption patterns described earlier in the article.

Figure 2: Example of a Remote PHY architecture with a DWDM digital link. Without needing extra fibers, the link between the headend and node has a greater capacity to accommodate new customers, like those in the apartment complex.

Let’s go back to our previous example of the upgraded headend with 10G digital fiber links. Thanks to DWDM technology, a single 10G port on this headend can support additional optical nodes in the network more cost-effectively than ever. Let’s say a new apartment complex was built, and the network operator needs to deploy a new node to service this new building. In the past, this deployment would have required lighting up a dark fiber and setting up an extra fiber link or using TDM technology with lower data rates, latency, and security. With DWDM, the new node can simply be carried through a different wavelength channel in the already existing fiber link. And as we will describe in our next article, autotuneability in DWDM transceivers makes their setup and maintenance even more affordable.

Takeaways

Cable networks need to serve more customers than ever with more symmetric upstream and downstream capacity, and they need to achieve this without changing their existing fiber and coaxial infrastructure. These goals become possible with the onset of Remote PHY and more accessible DWDM transceivers. By separating the MAC and PHY layer, Remote PHY reduces the load on the cable headend and allows for more virtualization of network functions, making it easier and more affordable to upgrade and manage the network. Meanwhile, DWDM enables connections from the headend to the Remote PHY nodes that serve tens of customers with a single fiber.

Tags: architectuyre, autotuneability, DWDM, fixed access networks, Integrated Photonics, optical transceivers, photonic integration, Photonics, pluggables, remote phy, Transceivers, tuneability

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.

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

Press Releases

December 15, 2021

Meet the team behind the EFFECT Photonics & Aston University partnership to bring greater bandwidth to a greener future

The optical transceiver market is expected to double in size by 2025, and coherent optical…

The optical transceiver market is expected to double in size by 2025, and coherent optical technology has come a long way over the past decade to become more accessible and thus have a greater impact on this market. When Nortel (later Ciena) introduced the first commercial coherent transponder in 2008, the device was a bulky, expensive line card with discrete components distributed on multiple circuit boards.

Recently, EFFECT Photonics and Aston University announced that they would collaborate as part of the newly formed Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Highly Integrated Coherent Optical Fibre Communications.

To learn more about this industry/academic partnership, we interviewed the three lead researchers in this project: Prof. Wladek Forysiak, Dr. Ian Phillips, and Dr. Stylianos Sygletos.

Tell us a little more about yourself and the team

Wladek: My background goes back almost to the start of the Aston Institute of Photonics Technology (AIPT). AIPT was formed by a couple of guys who came out of British Telecom and what was then part of the GEC Telecom Company. The institute has deep industrial roots, and hence the people who work at AIPT often like to participate in projects close to the industry with relatively short timescales. I joined the institute as a post-doc and then subsequently became an academic staff member.

Around 2000, I left alongside five others for a “virtual startup” with the Marconi company, and we formed an entity called Marconi Solstis. At that time, we developed a record-breaking terrestrial ultra long haul system, and we installed our first system in Australia, linking the cities of Perth and Adelaide. Marconi then morphed into Ericsson, and I stayed there for another six to seven years.

In 2010, I moved to Oclaro (now Lumentum), which does somewhat similar technology to what’s being developed by EFFECT Photonics on their integrated indium phosphide platform. I spent three or four years there before returning to academic life at Aston. As for the team, we have funding for three full-time Ph.D. students we’re currently working to recruit. They will be the cement, the foundation of our project.

Ian: I’m of a similar background to Wladek. My expertise is in transceivers, especially characterization and design. I completed my Ph.D. at Aston in 1997 in optical signal processing. British Telecom (BT) sponsored the project, and I worked there for a year after my Ph.D. Corning subsequently purchased the BT Photonics Lab in 2000, and I stayed there for another year. Afterward, I moved to Marconi Solstis with Wladek and stayed there until 2010, when Ericsson closed the site. I then worked in Italy for two years, transferring some system knowledge to the Ericsson research group there, and finally, I joined Aston in 2012.

Stylianos: I completed my Ph.D. at the National Technical University of Athens in 2006, focusing on the physical layer modeling of optical communication systems. I worked for a year at Athens Information Technology (i.e., a research center of Intracom, the largest telecom system provider in Greece). Between 2007 and 2009, I moved for a post-doc position in the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, working with Juerg Leuthold to model quantum-dot semiconductor optical amplifiers.

I then moved to the Tyndall National Institute in Ireland in 2009 to join the group of Andrew Ellis. I focused on the design and experimental implementation of phase-sensitive amplifiers and optical phase-locking solutions for these amplifiers.

After 2012, I joined AIPT as a research fellow, where my research interests eventually changed to digital signal processing and machine learning. I want to apply machine learning to the physical layer of optical communication systems. I’m now the director of two Master’s programs at Aston: the Smart Telecom and Sensing Networks (SMARTNET) and the Erasmus Mundus Photonic Integration and Networks (PIXNET), in collaboration with different universities in Europe and Japan.

What attracted you to collaborate with EFFECT Photonics?

Wladek: This project came about through a conversation between James (EFFECT Photonics’ CEO) and myself where he said, “Well, I’m interested in growing research activities to enhance our systems capability, and I have confidence in the experience of you and the Aston team”. So I said to him that one way to build a long-term relationship between a company and a university is through Ph.D. studentships.

AIPT is very much about doing applied research, and James was very much about the value of user-directed research that is close to the market and based on real-world situations. So he and I shared that vision around the partnership.

Another reason was, of course, that EFFECT Photonics has technology complementary to ours. EFFECT can be a source of advanced technology for us to build the best experiments that compete with the best in the world. Our competition is in the advanced labs of Japan, the US, and other areas in Europe, and having access to great components is key to matching their capabilities.

We also found attractive the ambition and drive of a startup company and its ability to make quick decisions. When I reached out to James with ideas, I could get an immediate yes or no answer, often on the call, for authorization.

Ian: James explained to us really well what EFFECT Photonics was doing, its ambitions, and how it aligned with our work. When we visited the facility in Brixham and were shown around the labs, it was all indicative of a company that wanted to get things done quickly, and hopefully, we can help them in that process.

Stylianos: On top of what Wladek already mentioned, it’s great to work with a startup that is more open to testing new technologies. I’m passionate about machine learning, and the prospect of applying machine learning algorithms to EFFECT Photonics’ novel technology platform is very exciting. I feel like there is an opportunity to make a big impact.

In what ways do the facilities of Aston University complement what EFFECT Photonics has?

Wladek: EFFECT Photonics develops advanced components that interest people like us working on optical communication systems and networks. We’re used to thinking about integrating these advanced components into our systems and getting the maximum capacity from point A to B.

We have a history of 30 years with optical fiber transmission, so we have all the necessary facilities for system modeling and testing. Stelios also brings to the party his expertise in DSP software, which is also critical to what EFFECT Photonics may do in the future.

Ian: We also see our job as training the Ph.D. students to pass on our knowledge of system design and how that reflects in EFFECT Photonics’ transceiver design. We want to train the students and get them to creatively and effectively use the components.

Stylianos: It depends on how the project goes, but we can even develop device models of EFFECT Photonics units and identify the device parameters that can meet network and system-level targets. We can even combine it with machine learning for extra optimization of those parameters.

What are some of the main challenges you hope to address?

Wladek: Looking for a greener future is a big challenge in optical comms. We’ve all witnessed it in the last couple of years with the pandemic. We need greater network capacity but also cheaper and greener. We cannot let that demand for capacity just be the same old technology since power consumption would go up and up and up.

The challenges are similar to what they’ve always been, in a way, but even more acute. And we need to do it all without really spending more money. Nobody wants to pay more for their comms at the end of the day.

We should also go in other directions to increase the capacity. For example, EFFECT Photonics’ current components are made for the optical C-band, but people in long-haul and other areas are looking at creating multiband components that can also operate in the L-band. We’ve also got projects currently looking at the S-band and shorter wavelengths. Researchers are also looking at different fibre structures to carry more and more signals.

At the same time, there’s an industry drive never to pay for more. Ultimately, that mindset has driven even more technical innovation. Capacity has gone up, but the price has gone down. It’s a relentless game, and everyone keeps saying there’s going to be a point at which we don’t need any more capacity, but if it’s there, we always find ways of using it.

Ian: One key challenge many companies are working on is increasing the baud rate, which is quite a technical problem. If you increase the baud rate, you increase the channel capacity too. It was stuck at around 28 GBaud for a long time, and now it’s going up 64 and even 100 GBaud.

Stylianos: I want to mention how important is network optimization to improve performance and reduce power consumption, which would lead to greener networks.

Network operators need to maintain large performance margins to secure a robust operation in different network conditions. In practice, however, these margins mean more power consumption. Ideally, you would like to reduce those margins by a more efficient design of your system and performance that can adapt to the different conditions. We can achieve these goals through machine learning.

This requires solutions for multi-objective optimization. For example, we are not just interested in designing the transmitter subsystem, but we want to see how transmitter performance is connected to network-level performance, as measured by throughput and power consumption. This is a complex problem that involves different layers of the system.

Takeaways

Moving towards a higher-capacity and greener future requires strong collaboration between academic and industrial partners with shared goals. EFFECT Photonics and Aston University share a vision around this greener future and the value of applied research.

This joint project will unite EFFECT Photonics’ component development expertise with Aston’s expertise in optical fiber transmission modeling, testing, and network optimization through machine learning. This union can enable faster, more affordable, and sustainable coherent products that give greater bandwidth to a greener future.

As Wladek mentioned in the interview, this joint project is looking for three PhD students to drive it forward, with the positions available to start in March, July, or October 2022. If you are interested in applying or know someone who might be interested, please visit the following link: https://jobs.aston.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=R210549 .

Tags: Aston University, bandwidth, coherent, coherent optics, CoherentPIC, digital signal processing, DWDM, Green Energy, optical network, photonic integration, Photonics, programmable optical system-on-chip, Royal Academy of Engineers, sustainability telecommunication energy efficency, Sustainable

Press Releases

December 13, 2021

EFFECT Photonics on the Top50 EIC ScalingUp list

EFFECT Photonics is delighted to announce that it is on the list of 50 most…

EFFECT Photonics is delighted to announce that it is on the list of 50 most promising European Deep Tech start-ups as part of the EIC ScalingUp programme. A Selection Committee of experienced investors chose to include EFFECT Photonics from more than 3,000 candidates in a selection process covering several stages. These companies are considered the most promising EIC (European Innovation Council) deep tech companies that have the potential to achieve substantial growth, and to become world-scale companies or to realise a big exit or IPO.

“Through the EIC ScalingUp project the EIC supports high-growth, high potential companies with visionary ideas, disruptive technologies, and the ambition to grow exponentially in Europe and globally.”– Jean-David Malo, Director, European Innovation Council (EIC) and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA).

“We are honoured to be part of this select group. Our thanks go to the European Innovation Council, Tech Tour, DeepWave Ventures, Boston Consulting Group and bpifrance for the opportunity to further expand on our ambitions to make complex, powerful optical systems simpler and more accessible.”– James Regan, CEO EFFEFCT Photonics.

To learn more about the EIC ScalingUp programme, please click here.

To download the Top50 Publication, please click here.

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. EFFECT Photonics is headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with additional R&D and manufacturing in South West UK, a subsidiary in Taiwan, a facility opening shortly outside Boston, and a worldwide network of sales partners.

Tags: Boston Consulting Group, bpifrance, Deep Tech, DeepWave Ventures, DWDM, EFFECT Photonics, EIC, EICscalingUp, Integrated Photonics, photonic integration, Photonics, PIC, TechTour, Top50

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

Press Releases

November 23, 2021

EFFECT Photonics winner in the Deep Tech Programme 2021!

EFFECT Photonics is pleased to share that it has been chosen as one of the…

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

Press Releases

October 8, 2021

EFFECT Photonics partners with Aston University to bring greater bandwidth to a greener future

EFFECT Photonics would like to congratulate Professor Wladek Forysiak from Aston University on his recently…

EFFECT Photonics would like to congratulate Professor Wladek Forysiak from Aston University on his recently announced appointment as the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Highly Integrated Coherent optical fibre Communications.

In this joint industry/academia research partnership, the HICC project will leverage the System-on-Chip technology and expertise in high density photonic integration and manufacturing from EFFECT Photonics. The Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) system design, performance testing and digital signal processing capabilities from Aston University will help further push the boundaries to broker a new era of short-distance optical networking based on “digital coherent” techniques. The aim is to identify and enable new network applications that will take coherent optics into new spaces. By further reducing the cost and power requirements of these components, sub-systems, and systems, this project will contribute to a more sustainable and greener future by providing greater bandwidth to everyone.

“EFFECT Photonics has the unique technology to build a fully integrated coherent optical system on a chip, with world leading energy efficiency that enables high performance in a small module. Prof. Forysiak embodies a distinctive combination of cutting-edge optical systems academic research with extensive industrial sector experience at Marconi, Ericsson and Oclaro, and is embedded within Aston University, one of Europe’s leading universities for optical transmission research. The Royal Academy of Engineering funding and expertise brings these elements together. With this partnership we can build a powerhouse that will push the envelope of very high bandwidth internet close to the user for the benefit of all society. I am very excited about this collaboration!” – James Regan, CEO.

“I am delighted to be supported by The Royal Academy of Engineering, EFFECT Photonics, and Aston University to work on the HICC project, together with my close colleagues, Dr Ian Phillips and Dr Stelios Sygletos. The complimentary expertise of EFFECT Photonics in highly integrated System-on-Chip photonics technology and Aston’s long experience in WDM systems R&D provides an ideal platform for this industry/academia research partnership. Together, we have a compelling vision, and I am particularly delighted by the prospect of collaborating with the innovators at EFFECT Photonics, and experiencing the energy, drive and ambition of its start-up working culture.” – Prof. Wladek Forysiak.

EFFECT Photonics’ programmable System-on-Chip technology lies at the heart of its developments in coherent optics. The aim is to provide products that offer line card performance and functions in a pluggable form factor with a very high energy efficiency. This means that performance that has historically been big and expensive, will be pushed to the edges of the network including the encryption and data security you would normally expect to find in a line card. In addition, by lowering the cost and energy consumption per bit, the next generation EFFECT Photonics solutions will enable a more sustainable and greener optical network.

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. Headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with additional R&D, manufacturing in South West UK and a facility opening soon in the US, with sales partners worldwide.

https://effectphotonics.com/stagingenvironment123
Press contact: press@effectphotonics.com

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