Sustainable Archives - EFFECT Photonics

shutterstock_1933377149 RENEWABLE ENERGY

Insights

May 15, 2024

The Impact of Photonics on Renewable Energy Systems

The quest for sustainable and clean energy solutions has increasingly turned towards photonics innovations. This…

Insights

April 24, 2024

Transceiver Customization for Flexible Access Networks

Let’s be honest: not every optical network problem can be solved by scaling up capacity.…

Let’s be honest: not every optical network problem can be solved by scaling up capacity. It’s not always cost-effective, and it’s not always sustainable. Providers and operators who want to become market leaders must scale up while also learning to allocate their existing network resources most efficiently and dynamically. For example, they must monitor their network performance frequently, providing more energy and capacity to high-traffic links while reducing power and capacity in areas with little traffic. They must find hardware that fits the rest of their network devices to a tee instead of equipment that is over- or under-specified.

Operators usually change settings in the higher network layers to adjust their networks dynamically. For example, artificial intelligence in network layer management will become a major factor in reducing the energy consumption of telecom networks. However, as networks get increasingly complex, operators need more degrees of freedom and knobs to adjust. They must customize the network and physical layers to fit the network best.

Fortunately, the new generation of pluggable transceivers gives operators more customization options than ever to change physical layer settings and adapt to these changing and growing network requirements and use cases. In this article, we will provide examples from our own pluggable transceivers and NarroWave technology.

Customization for Remote Diagnostics and Management

NarroWave sets up a separate low-frequency communication channel between two modules. This channel allows the headend module to remotely modify certain aspects of the tail-end module, effectively enabling several remote management and diagnostics options.

For example, the operator can remotely measure metrics such as the transceiver temperature and power transmitted and received. These metrics can provide a quick and useful health check of the link. The headend module can also remotely read alarms for low/high values of these metrics.

Even after buying the module, our customers can customize several variables, such as the low/high transmitter power levels, NarroWave self-tuning variables, memory behavior when turning on/off, or also the temperature and power flags and alarms. Customers also have the freedom to rewrite administrative information such as the vendor name, organization unique identifier (OUI), serial and part numbers, and passwords to access certain memory registers. These features are useful for system integrators and OEM sellers.

Customization for Easier Installation

Some of our transceiver features are customizations that make installation tasks easier. For example, setting up a network sometimes requires fibers to be repatched, which creates a loss of signal (LOS). Our NarroWave procedures include a customizable Ignore LOS (in seconds) flag that holds up the self-tuning scan and allows operators to perform maintenance duties without causing error messages at the host equipment.

These remote diagnostics and management features can eliminate certain truck rolls and save more operational expenses. They are especially convenient when dealing with very remote and hard-to-reach sites (e.g., an underground installation) that require expensive truck rolls.

Customization for Energy Sustainability

To talk about the impact of transceiver customization on energy sustainability, we first must review the concept of performance margins. This number is a vital measure of received signal quality and determines how much room there is for the signal to degrade without impacting the error-free operation of the optical link.

In the past, network designers have played it safe, maintaining large margins to ensure a robust network operation in different conditions. However, these higher margins usually require higher transmitter power and power consumption. Network management software can develop tighter, more accurate optical link budgets in real time that require lower residual margins through the remote diagnostics provided by this new generation of pluggable transceivers. This could lower the required transceiver powers and save valuable energy.

Another related sustainability feature is deciding whether to operate on low- or high-power mode depending on the optical link budget and fiber length. For example, if the transceiver needs to operate at its maximum 10G speed, it will likely need a higher performance margin and output power. However, if the operator uses the transceiver for just a 1G link, the transceiver can operate with a smaller residual margin and use a lower power setting. The transceiver uses energy more efficiently and sustainably by adapting to these circumstances.

Takeaways

Thanks to the advances in photonics and electronic integration, the new generation of pluggable transceivers has packaged many knobs and variables that previously required additional, specialized hardware that increased network complexity and costs. These advances give designers and operators more degrees of freedom than ever.

There are customizations that enable simpler remote management and diagnostics or easier installations. There are also customizable power settings that help the transceiver operate more sustainably. These benefits make access networks simpler, more affordable, and more sustainable to build and operate.

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Tags: access networks, alarms, capacity, channel, cost-effective, customization options, customize, dynamically, EFFECT Photonics, efficiently, electronic integration, energy sustainability, fiber length, hardware, health check, high-traffic links, installation tasks, low-traffic areas, management, metrics, NarroWave technology, network devices, network management software, network resources, operational expenses, operators, optical network, performance margins, Photonics, Pluggable Transceivers, power, power consumption, providers, remote diagnostics, remote sites, Scaling up, Signal degradation, Sustainable

Insights

May 31, 2023

Building a Sustainable Future with Fully Integrated PICs

Article first published 27 September 2021, updated 31st May 2023. The demand for data and…

Article first published 27 September 2021, updated 31st May 2023.

The demand for data and other digital services is rising exponentially. From 2010 to 2020, the number of Internet users worldwide doubled, and global internet traffic increased 12-fold. By 2022, internet traffic had doubled yet again. 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. These issues do not just affect the environment but also the bottom lines of communications companies.

Keeping up with the increasing data demand of future networks sustainably will require operators to deploy more optical technologies, such as photonic integrated circuits (PICs), in their access and fronthaul networks.

Integration Impacts Energy Efficiency and Optical Losses

Lately, we have seen many efforts to increase further the integration on a component level across the electronics industry. For example, moving towards greater integration of components in a single chip has yielded significant efficiency benefits in electronics processors. Apple’s recent M1 and M2 processors integrate all electronic functions in a single system-on-chip (SoC) and consume significantly less power than the processors with discrete components used in their previous generations of computers.

𝗠𝗮𝗰 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗶 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹	𝗣𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
𝗠𝗮𝗰 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗶 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹	𝗜𝗱𝗹𝗲	𝗠𝗮𝘅
2023, M2	7	5
2020, M1	7	39
2018, Core i7	20	122
2014, Core i5	6	85
2010, Core 2 Duo	10	85
2006, Core Solo or Duo	23	110
2005, PowerPC G4	32	85
Table 1: Comparing the power consumption of a Mac Mini with an M1 and M2 SoC chips to previous generations of Mac Minis. [Source: Apple’s website]

Photonics is also achieving greater efficiency gains by following a similar approach to integration. The more active and passive optical components (lasers, modulators, detectors, etc.) manufacturers can integrate on a single chip, the more energy they can save since they avoid coupling losses between discrete components and allow for interactive optimization.

Let’s start by discussing three different levels of device integration for an optical device like a transceiver:

Discrete build – The transceiver components are manufactured through separate processes. The components are then assembled into a single package using different types of interconnections.
Partial integration – Some components are manufactured and integrated on the same chip, but others are manufactured or sourced separately. For example, the transceiver laser can be manufactured separately on a different material and then interconnected to a chip with the other transceiver components.
Full integration – All the components are manufactured on a single chip from a single material simultaneously.

While discrete builds and partial integration have advantages in managing the production yield of the individual components, full integration leads to fewer optical losses and more efficient packaging and testing processes, making them a much better fit in terms of sustainability.

The interconnects required to couple discrete components result in electrical and optical losses that must be compensated with higher transmitter power and more energy consumption. The more interconnects between different components, the higher the losses become. Discrete builds will have the most interconnect points and highest losses. Partial integration reduces the number of interconnect points and losses compared to discrete builds. If these components are made from different optical materials, the interconnections will suffer additional losses.

On the other hand, full integration uses a single chip of the same base material. It does not require lossy interconnections between chips, minimizing optical losses and significantly reducing the energy consumption and footprint of the transceiver device.

Figure 1: Example of integrating a laser to other photonic components through different integration approaches.

More Integration Saves Scarce Resources

When it comes to energy consumption and sustainability, we shouldn’t just think about the energy the PIC consumes but also the energy and carbon footprint of fabricating the chip and assembling the transceiver. To give an example from the electronics sector, a Harvard and Facebook study estimated that for Apple, manufacturing accounts for 74% of their carbon emissions, with integrated circuit manufacturing comprising roughly 33% of Apple’s carbon output. That’s higher than the emissions from product use.

Figure 2: Apple’s carbon-emission breakdown. Manufacturing accounts for 74% of total emissions, and hardware use accounts for 19%. Carbon output from manufacturing integrated circuits (i.e., SoCs, DRAM, and NAND flash memory) is higher than that of hardware use. [Source: ]

Early Testing Avoids Wastage

Testing is another aspect of the manufacturing process that impacts sustainability. The earlier faults can be found in the testing process, the greater the impact on the use of materials and the energy used to 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 3: Package level (top row) vs. die level (bottom row) testing. Manufacturers can find faults earlier by testing at the die level, which avoids wasting packaging materials.

Discrete and partial integration approaches do more of their optical testing on the finalized package, after connecting all the different components together. Should just one of the components not pass the testing process, the complete packaged transceiver would need to be discarded, potentially leading to a massive waste of materials as nothing can be ”fixed” or reused at this stage of the manufacturing process.

Full 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 valuable energy and materials.

Full Integration Drives Sustainability

While communication networks have become more energy-efficient, further technological improvements must continue decreasing the cost of energy per bit and keeping up with the exponential increase in Internet traffic. At the same time, a greater focus is being placed on the importance of sustainability and responsible manufacturing. All the photonic integration approaches we have touched on will play a role in reducing the energy consumption of future networks. However, out of all of them, only full integration is in a position to make a significant contribution to the goals of sustainability and environmentally friendly manufacturing. A fully integrated system-on-chip minimizes optical losses, transceiver energy consumption, power usage, and materials wastage while at the same time ensuring increased energy efficiency of the manufacturing, packaging, and testing process.

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Tags: ChipIntegration, Data demand, DataDemand, EFFECT Photonics, Energy consumption reduction, energy efficiency, EnergySavings, Environmental impact, Fully Integrated PICs, Green Future, GreenFuture, Integrated Photonics, Integration benefits, Manufacturing sustainability, Optical technologies, OpticalComponents, photonic integration, PIC, PICs, ResponsibleManufacturing, sustainability telecommunication, Sustainable, Sustainable future, SustainableNetworks, Transceiver optimization

We interview Russell Fuerst, our VP of Digital Signal Processing.

Insights

September 29, 2022

The Future of Coherent DSP Design: Interview with Russell Fuerst

Digital signal processors (DSPs) are the heart of coherent communication systems. They not only encode/decode…

Digital signal processors (DSPs) are the heart of coherent communication systems. They not only encode/decode data into the three properties of a light signal (amplitude, phase, polarization) but also handle error correction, analog-digital conversation, Ethernet framing, and compensation of dispersion and nonlinear distortion. And with every passing generation, they are assigned more advanced functions such as probabilistic constellation shaping.

There are still many challenges ahead to improve DSPs and make them transmit even more bits in more energy-efficient ways. Now that EFFECT Photonics has incorporated talent and intellectual property from Viasat’s Coherent DSP team, we hope to contribute to this ongoing research and development and make transceivers faster and more sustainable than ever. We ask Russell Fuerst, our Vice-President of Digital Signal Processing, how we can achieve these goals.

What’s the most exciting thing about joining EFFECT Photonics?

Before being acquired by EFFECT Photonics, our DSP design team has been a design-for-hire house. We’ve been doing designs for other companies that have put those designs in their products. By joining EFFECT Photonics, we can now do a design and stamp our brand on it. That’s exciting.

The other exciting thing is to have all the technologies under one roof. Having everything from the DSP to the PIC to the packaging and module-level elements in one company will allow us to make our products that much better.

We also find the company culture to be very relaxed and very collaborative. Even though we’re geographically diverse, it’s been straightforward to understand what other people and groups in the company are doing. It’s easy to talk to others and find out whom you need to talk to. There’s not a whole lot of organizational structure that blocks communication, so it’s been excellent from that perspective.

People at EFFECT Photonics were welcoming from day one, making us that much more excited to join.

What key technology challenges must be solved by DSP designers to thrive in the next 5 to 10 years?

The key is to bring the power down while also increasing the performance.

In the markets where coherent has been the de-facto solution, I think it’s essential to understand how to drive cost and power down either through the DSP design itself or by integrating the DSP with other technologies within the module. That will be where the benefits come from in those markets.

Similarly, there are markets where direct detection is the current technology of choice. We must understand how to insert coherent technology into those markets while meeting the stringent requirements of those important high-volume markets. Again, this progress will be largely tied to performance within the power and cost requirements.

As DSP technology has matured, other aspects outside of performance are becoming key, and understanding how we can work that into our products will be the key to success.

How do you think the DSP can be more tightly integrated with the PIC?

This is an answer that will evolve over time. We will become more closely integrated with the team in Eindhoven and learn some of the nuances of their mature design process. And similarly, they’ll understand the nuances of our design process that have matured over the years. As we understand the PIC technology and our in-house capabilities better, that will bring additional improvements that are currently unknown.

Right now, we are primarily focused on the obvious improvements tied to the fully-integrated platform. For example, the fact that we can have the laser on the PIC because of the active InP material. We want to understand how we co-design aspects of the module and shift the complexity from one design piece or component to another, thanks to being vertically integrated.

Another closely-tied area for improvement is on the modulator side. We think that the substantially lower drive voltages required for the InP modulator give us the possibility to eliminate some components, such as RF drivers. We could potentially drive the modulator directly from that DSP without any intermediary electronics, which would reduce the cost and power consumption. That’s not only tied to the lower drive voltages but also some proprietary signal conditioning we can do to minimize some of the nonlinearities in the modulator and improve the performance.

What are the challenges and opportunities of designing DSPs for Indium phosphide instead of silicon?

So, we already mentioned two opportunities with the laser and the modulator.

I think the InP integration makes the design challenges smaller than those facing DSP design for silicon photonics. The fact is that InP can have more active integrated components and that DSPs are inherently active electronic devices, so getting the active functions tuned and matched over time will be a challenge. It motivates our EFFECT DSP team to quickly integrate with the experienced EFFECT PIC design team to understand the fundamental InP platform a bit better. Once we understand it, the DSP designs will get more manageable with improved performance, especially as we have control over the designs of both DSP and PIC. As we get to the point where co-packaging is realized, there will also be some thermal management issues to consider.

When we started doing coherent DSP designs for optical communication over a decade ago, we pulled many solutions from the RF wireless and satellite communications space into our initial designs. Still, we couldn’t bring all those solutions to the optical markets.

However, when you get more of the InP active components involved, some of those solutions can finally be brought over and utilized. They were not used before in our designs for silicon photonics because silicon is not an active medium and lacked the performance to exploit these advanced techniques.

For example, we have done proprietary waveforms tuned to specific satellite systems in the wireless space. Our DSP team was able to design non-standard constellations and modulation schemes that increased the capacity of the satellite link over the previous generation of satellites. Similarly, we could tune the DSP’s waveform and performance to the inherent advantages of the InP platform to improve cost, performance, bandwidth utilization, and efficiency. That’s something that we’re excited about.

Takeaways

As Russell explained, the big challenge for DSP designers continues to be increasing performance while keeping down the power consumption. Finding ways to integrate the DSP more deeply with the InP platform can overcome this challenge, such as direct control of the laser and modulator from the DSP to novel waveform shaping methods. The presence of active components in the InP platforms also gives DSP designers the opportunity to import more solutions from the RF wireless space.

We look forward to our new DSP team at EFFECT Photonics settling into the company and trying out all these solutions to make DSPs faster and more sustainable!

Tags: coherent, DSP, energy efficient, InP, integration, performance, power consumption, Sustainable, Viasat

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

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.

http://www.effectphotonics.com
Press contact: press@effectphotonics.com

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Sustainable

Transfer Data, Not Power

Photonics and Solar Energy

The Impact on Wind Energy Monitoring

Takeaways

Customization for Remote Diagnostics and Management

Customization for Easier Installation

Customization for Energy Sustainability

Takeaways

Integration Impacts Energy Efficiency and Optical Losses

More Integration Saves Scarce Resources

Early Testing Avoids Wastage

Full Integration Drives Sustainability

What’s the most exciting thing about joining EFFECT Photonics?

What key technology challenges must be solved by DSP designers to thrive in the next 5 to 10 years?

How do you think the DSP can be more tightly integrated with the PIC?

What are the challenges and opportunities of designing DSPs for Indium phosphide instead of silicon?

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Tell us a little more about yourself and the team

What attracted you to collaborate with EFFECT Photonics?

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

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

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