The POSEIDON project has started – Aiming at a breakthrough in nanophotonic devices

/in /by

The FET-OPEN project POSEIDON had its kick-off meeting on January, 23-24, 2020 in Aachen, Germany, in the facilities of AMO GmbH. POSEIDON is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, which aims at developing a radically new bottom-up approach for integrated light sources for silicon photonics.

“We will tear down the massive costs and complexity barriers of current top-down approaches for fabricating photonic integrated circuits”, says the project coordinator Anna Lena Giesecke from AMO GmbH. “The idea is to integrate light sources directly into the photonic circuits by exploiting the self-assembly of active colloids on chips. In this way, we will be able to realize cheap and yet very powerful optical devices, with a very broad range of applications, from data centers to medical sensors.”

Group picture of the POSEIDON team during the kick-off meeting on Jan. 23-34, 2020.

While the range of potential applications is broad, the project targets explicitly the usual wavelengths of data-communications, with the goal of realizing cheap and efficient optical switches to drastically improve the energy efficiency of data-centers and network performance. The project itself is extremely exciting from the scientific and the technological point of view, as it requires developing a multi-scale approach to design and control the self-assembly of the colloids with nanometer-scale resolution in all three spatial directions, directly on photonic integrated circuits.

The project involves eight partners, which represent some of the top EU innovation-performers in:

  • modelling and simulation (University of Hull, UK and CSIC San Sebastian, Spain),
  • colloid synthesis (University of Siegen, Germany and CIC biomaGUNE, Spain),
  • hierarchical assembly (FA University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany and University of Hull),
  • development of electrically pumped colloidal light sources (University of Hull, University of Cambridge, UK and AMO) and
  • fabrication of photonic integrated circuits (AMO).

The coordination and dissemination of the project is supported by AMIRES, Czech Republic. POSEIDON is also endorsed by key innovation players (IBM, Hitachi, Mellanox, Causeway Sensors, Senseair), who support the project as external advisory board. More information on the project can be found at https://poseidon-fet.eu

POSEIDON will run for 48 months. Keep tuned on the upcoming project results!

Project coordinator
Dr. Anna Lena Giesecke
AMO GmbH
email: giesecke@amo.de

Project manager
Kristina Pandek
AMIRES s.r.o.
email: pandek@amires.eu

POSEIDON is founded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 861950.