Mellanox Technologies joins MIRAGE

Today, the European Commission’s MIRAGE project on next generation optical interconnects announced that Mellanox Technologies Ltd has joined its consortium. The three-year research program aims to develop breakthrough photonic integration technology enabling terabit capacities in optical interconnect links.

The MIRAGE project now brings together eight partners from across the value chain comprising university research centers and leading companies from several European countries.

Today the internet is transforming into a content-centric network with billions of users demanding ubiquitous, instant access to vast amounts of data. In this new networking paradigm data centers – the repositories of online information – are becoming the hot spots of the internet. As data centers consist of hundreds or even thousands of servers interconnected with each other, content providers are currently facing the challenge of increasing the interconnection speed to improve data delivery to the end user.

The ambition of MIRAGE is to escalate optical interconnect speed from the current state-of-the-art that hardly exceeds 140 Gb/s per link and bring it to the terabit scale. To do so, the program will tackle all the individual challenges for achieving its goal with a technology suitable for commercial adoption: high speed VCSELs, low energy consumption electronic drivers and a flexible motherboard technology will enable new functionalities like wavelength multiplexing, multi-level modulation and multicore fibre coupling, introducing new degrees of parallelization into the optical interconnect ecosystem. Moreover, new assembly processes based on 3D integration of electronic and optical components will be developed to effectively blend silicon, glass and III-V photonic elements with CMOS electronic drivers.

“We are delighted to join the consortium as MIRAGE partner,” remarked Evelyn Landman, vice president of engineering at Mellanox. “This project is performing exciting new research on the next generation high-speed interconnects necessary to scale networks of the future.”

“MIRAGE builds on European competencies to develop innovative photonic technology and deliver value-added components”, explains project coordinator Hercules Avramopoulos. “Focusing on industry-qualified processes it has all the credentials to reinforce the competitiveness of European industry and bring it to the forefront of the thriving optical interconnects market”.

About MIRAGE

MIRAGE is a research project focused on optical rack-to-rack and board-to-board interconnects and is supported by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) of the European Commission (EC). The total budget of the project is EUR 4,169,372.00, with EUR 2,999,964.00 of that coming from the European Commission. The project started officially October 1, 2012 and will run for three years. The consortium, headed by the National Technical University of Athens (GR), comprises AMS (AT), OptoScribe Ltd. (UK), Technische Universität München (DE), Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (BE), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (GR) AMO GmbH (DE) and Mellanox Technologies, Ltd (IL).

For further information please contact:
National Technical University of Athens
Project Coordinator
Prof. Hercules Avramopoulos
Tel: +30 210 772 2057
e-mail: hav@mail.ntua.gr

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd.
Arlon Martin, Sr. Director, Marketing
Tel: +1-626-236-4551
e-mail: arlonm@mellanox.com