OREANDA-NEWS. ICT-STREAMS, a part of the European Union Horizon 2020 program, is a new ambitious project that was launched on 1st February 2016 with the goal to develop the necessary set of transceiver and routing technologies to enable multi-terabit on-board chip-to-chip communications.

The ever-growing demands of mega data centers and high-performance computers for increased bandwidth at a fraction of real-estate and power consumption are pushing current pluggable optics interconnection solutions to their limits. ICT-STREAMS research efforts are aligned with the next generation embedded optical transceivers, placed on-board and in close proximity to the electronic modules, as a way to drastically reduce the required physical space and power budget. To this end, the three year research project aims to develop a set of innovative technologies for the optical engines and board platform and combine them in a radically new approach of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) routing architecture in order to increase the state of the art server-board density by >400% and throughput by 1600%, with a 10 fold reduced energy consumption.

ICT-STREAMS will exploit silicon photonics technology in order develop ultra-powerful, compact, Dense Wavelength Division Multipling (DWDM), high channel count and dense embedded optical engines with the ability to exhibit aggregate throughputs beyond 1Tb/s. ICT-STREAMS will also develop a thermal drift compensation system employing a non-invasive wavelength monitoring and control technology to guarantee real-life applicability of the proposed multi-channel Si-Pho technology. On the board level, a single mode polymer-based electro-optical PCB (EOPCB) will be developed to serve as the host platform that will efficiently route both optical and high frequency electrical data across the board. As a way to relax manufacturing time and cost requirements associated with complex optical assembly processes, optical engines will rely on novel III/V-on-Si in-plane lasers for optical sourcing while adiabatic coupling will be employed for I/O interfacing with the electro-optical PCB host platform. Finally, ICT-STREAMS will assemble the new optical engines on the polymer EOPCB together with a 16x16 AWGR-based routing component to leverage WDM technology from just a parallel transmission tool to a massive any-to-any, collision-less and low latency routing platform with 25.6Tb/s aggregate throughput capability. Photonic crystal based III/V-on-Si nano-amplifiers will be introduced as a new amplification paradigm to enable optical power balanced links with advanced features and smart routing functionalities.