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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - COSMICC (CmOs Solutions for Mid-board Integrated transceivers with breakthrough Connectivity at ultra-low Cost)

Teaser

Summary

Information and communication technologies are entering the ZettaByte era (1 ZB =1021 bytes = 1 billion terabytes). In 2014, 4.4 ZB of information were created in a year and it will double every 2 years. Datacentres will be the main locations of data transmission (>80%) and storage.
To allow accessing and using such an amount of information in the most effective way at the datacenter level and enable the continued growth of data transfer and storage over the internet, low cost (<1â‚¬/Gbit/s), high speed (>100Gbit/s per fiber), and efficient (~1pJ per transmitted bit of data) transmission solutions are needed for [0-2km] interconnects at very high volumes (~10 million units for 4 channel-modules).
The major capital expenditure of datacenters is switches, servers, memory and interconnect between these units. As the switch ASIC become larger and increase in Input/Output bandwidth, the optical transceiver needs to sit closer to the switch, and be positioned on the switch board, limiting the non-efficient electrical path between the two. This location requirement adds new constraints on the optical transceiver packaging as mid-board transceivers are preferred to conventional standalone modules.
The current optical transceiver solutions for intra-datacenter applications suffer from limited performances for the VCSELs-based transceivers, which can only provide 25Gbit/s per fiber up to 100m of Multi Mode Fiber (MMF) at a cost of ~2â‚¬/Gbit/s, or from too high cost for traditional telecom WDM transceivers based on InP technology which can provide 4 x 25Gb/s but at a current cost of 60â‚¬/Gbit/s.
Optical integration has the promise to significantly reduce cost while meeting the needed performances. This is especially true when a large fraction of the functions in a transceiver can be integrated on the same platform with high yield. In the past years, a lot of attention has been paid to Si Photonic optical passive and active devices integrated using CMOS compatible process, with mass-production capabilities. However, Si Photonics transceivers have not entered the market to compete either with VCSELs, as having still high packaging costs, or with traditional WDM transceivers, as the implementation of the technique faces strong technical barriers on the current photonic integration platform.
The COSMICC consortium gathers key industrial and research partners with world-leading positions in the fields of Silicon photonics, CMOS electronics, Printed Circuit Board-Packaging, Optical transceivers and Data-Centers around a strong vision: mass commercialization of Si-photonics-based transceivers is possible starting in 2019 by enhancing the existing photonic integration platform of one of the partners, STMicroelectronics.
COSMICC will develop optical transceivers that will be packaged on-board (Figure1). Combining CMOS electronics and Si-photonics with innovative-high-throughput fiber-attachment techniques, the developed solutions are scalable to meet the future data-transmission requirements in data-centers and Super computing systems. With performances improved by an order of magnitude as compared with current VCSELs transceivers, COSMICC developed technology will answer tremendous market needs with a target cost per bit that the traditional WDM transceivers cannot meet. The early setting up of a new value chain will enable exploitation of the developed technologies.

Work performed

In a first high reward step-modification of the fabrication platform, COSMICC consortium will achieve mid-board optical transceivers in the [2Tbit/s -2pJ/bit- 0.2â‚¬ per Gbit/s]-class with ~200Gbit/s per fiber: the introduction of one process brick (SiN layer) in the photonic process will enable low-cost packaging techniques (up to 2x12 fiber channels) and practical coarse WDM implementation (4 wavelengths with no temperature-control requirements). The built demonstrators will be tested in lab and field environments. In compliancy with the enhanced-fabrication platform, lasers will be developed by heterogeneous integration of III-V material, targeting improved temperature behavior, and doubled-bit-rate payback.
A second step-modification of the fabrication platform will consist in evaluating a disruptive process that enables SiGe layers with tunable Si-composition for achieving micrometer-scale devices.

During the first six months of the project, COSMICC partners have started technological developments to push the current Silicon photonic platform at STMicroelectronics to increase data rate from 25 Gb/s per fiber to 100 Gb/s per fiber with 2-wavelength multiplexing of 50 Gb/s channels. In parallel, they are also working on the design and integration of SiN-based temperature-insensitive photonic devices on the SOI platform for 4 wavelength coarse WDM multiplexing, without temperature control. The additional SiN layer is also used to develop low-cost packaging through high-count fiber connectorisation and on-board polymer routing for a future transceiver demonstrator integrated on-board and featuring 200 Gb/s per fiber with an aggregated data rate of 2.4 Tb/s using 12 fibers .

Final results

Silicon Photonic transceivers are quite new on the market, their production level is still very low and this technology is not ready for a full market penetration. However, Silicon Photonics technology is expected to grow in the next years, triggered by the high need of datacenters.
COSMICC partners have identified all the Key Success Factors to introduce the developed transceivers on the market, whatever their nature is technological, economic, environmental or regulatory. The technological, economic, environmental, organisational and societal factors are the most important to address.
Penetrating the <100Gb/s, <2km transmission market for intra-datacenter communications requires the achievement of crucial key figures of merit. They are low cost (â‚¬1 per Gbit/s), high bit rate per fiber (>100Gb/s), low energy consumption (1pJ/bit).
The COSMICC consortium has been created to completely cover a new value chain of transceivers, with R&D partners bringing and demonstrating new components or integration technologies (CEA, USTAN, ORC, UPV, UPS), industrial experts in design and mass manufacturing of Silicon Photonics and CMOS electronics (ST-Cr2 and ST-I), industrial experts in PCB and PCB-embedded polymer waveguide manufacturing (VAR), major players in devices/modules assembly (Finisar), and industrial end users at the system level, convinced of the added value of the COSMICC transceivers for storage and HPC applications (Seagate). The consortium has a strong implantation in standardization working groups and this will be a key element for defining solutions that will be broadly adopted.