23 March 2012
Active Plasmonics approaching real-world optical interconnect applications
A European research project on plasmonics and silicon photonics called PLATON raises awareness in science and industry. For the first time, the project partners demonstrated 0.48 Terabit per Second data transmission through plasmonic waveguides heterointegrated onto a highly scalable photonic SOI motherboard. Morever, they evaluated active plasmonics in true data channel switching applications, thereby for the first time confirming their potential to enable low-energy and fast routing circuitry. This marks a significant step towards the introduction of plasmonics into real-world applications such as in the fields of telecommunication, data communication and high performance computing.
Plasmonics, in which so called oscillations - so called plasmons - are utilized, represents a highly promising field. One big advantage of plasmons - sometimes called "light on a wire" - is the possibility of having the same high integration density as electrical components while simultaneously facilitating high-speed data communication as in photonic devices. By bridging photonics and electronics, plasmonics benefits from the advantages of both technologies. Consequently, by using ultra-compact plasmonic structures, energy-efficient devices for high-speed communication can be realized. This will bring important advantages to the end-users. It will enable high-speed and low-power communication and ultra-fast access to data information in large computer centers. This is expected to reduce cost, power consumption and size requirements, enabling the effective consolidation of today's internet and computer server rooms that store huge amounts of information into smaller-size rack environments.
Within the PLATON-project six partners from Greece, Denmark, France and Germany for the first time will realize an optical routing system for data
Schematic view, as envisioned within the PLATON-project, of the plasmonic 4x4 router prototype hosting on a SOI photonic motherboard with integrated electroni control circuits.
networks of data rates up to 1 Terabyte per second. Recently, WDM-data transmission with an aggregate bandwidth of 0.48 Tbit/s by using plasmonic waveguides heterointegrated onto a silicon photonic platform has been demonstrated by the PLATON consortiumii. In addition, an active plasmonic device for traffic switching in telecom and datacom applications has been presented for the very first time. It is remarkable that even with this firstly realized active plasmonic device a new world record in efficiency (power consumption - time response product) for undoped thermo-optically controlled nanophotonic MZI switches on SOI has been achievediii. By introducing WDM in active plasmonics, it is therefore expected that until the end of the project an energy-efficient router prototype with 1 Tbit/s capacity for switching applications will be presented.
This is completely in-line with the requirements set by the computing industry for 2020, where the power consumption of optics employed in High-Performance Computing (HPC) centers has to go below 1mW/Gb/s. As Bert Jan Offrein, PLATON's Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) member from IBM Zurich, put it: "The performance of HPC doubles every two years. Without significant innovation, the HPC industry will face some serious technological issues. System today - need in the order of five million optical fiber pieces to connect different components to a whole system. With today's technology, this number would increase up to billions by 2030. Moreover, the power consumed per Gigabit/second needs to be reduced by a factor of 50 in 2020 in order to avoid a thermal overkill in future systems.".
PLATON is the first project with the opportunity to reveal a plasmonic-route for routing in interconnects. An Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) comprised of leading industry and SMEs was set up in order to meet industry standards and facilitate the penetration of the developed plasmonic platform into the market. PLATON's IAB is run by Tuomo von Lerber from Luxdyne, Efstratios Kehayas and Leontios Stampoulidis from Constelex Technology Enablers, Rosie Cush and Mike Wale from Oclaro, Bert Jan Offrein from IBM Zurich and Henning Bülow from Alcatel-Lucent Bells Germany.
Within last years' IAB meeting, it was generally acknowledged that the PLATON-project is fully in-line with the goals set by the computing industry, as it aims to provide a new chip-scale technology platform for back-plane and chip-to-chip routing with significant reductions in power consumption and complexity. The demonstrations of WDM transmission and low-energy switching using plasmonics on a SOI waveguide platform recently shown will open up totally new application vistas and opportunities for the European industry active in the field of nanophotonics, given also that the active participation of industry within PLATON ensures the industrial take-up of the combined plasmonics/ photonics functional devices from research elements to commercially available products.
The PLATON-project is coordinated by the Greek Centre for Research and Technology Hellas. Their main responsibility within PLATON is the analysis, design and optimization of the final Terabit per Second router prototype. With Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Institut für Zuverlässige & Mikrointegration in Berlin, the Syddansk Universitet, Denmark, Université de Bourgogne, France, the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems/ National Technical University of Athens, Greece, as well as AMO GmbH, Aachen, the main partners with competencies in optics and photonics are working together to reach the challenging project targets.
The commercial exploitation of the PLATON components is guaranteed with the involvement of AMO GmbH, a German SME fabrication specialist for SOI nanophotonic devices. AMO's mission is not only the development of innovative technologies for nanoelectronics and nanophotonics but also their implementation in novel device architectures and up to prototype construction. AMO GmbH will actively seek to promote the new technology to its industrial partners as a disruptive solution that can deliver advanced hardware for radically upgrading data communication networks and new technological solutions for silicon photonics fabrication foundries.
The PLATON-project is supported by the European Commission within the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-4). Further project details are available on the project website www.ict-platon.eu.
