CST Global receives £318k for SUPER8 project
UK government-funded project to develop scalable, 200Gbps, super-thermal, 8-channel CWDM architecture.
UK III-V optoelectronics fab CST Global has announced that it will receive £318,039 for its part in the SUPER8 project to develop 200Gbps, 8-channel, CWDM transceivers.
The £1.1m UK Government-funded project aims to develop scalable, 200Gbps, super-thermal, 8-channel CWDM (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing) architecture. This will be applied to an ultra, high-speed, industry-standard, transceiver platform for use in the optical, data communications of hyper-scale, cloud data centres.
The project consortium partners include CST Global, Scotland; Compound Semiconductor Centre CSC, a Cardiff University and IQE plc joint venture, based in Cardiff; and transceiver, photonic, integrated circuit manufacturer, Kaiam of Newark, CA, USA.
"Cloud services, video-on-demand and the Internet of Things are increasing data bandwidth demand in global communications networks," explains Andrew McKee, technical director at CST Global. "This is driving the need for higher capacity networks with greater transmission rates and a lower cost base.
"CWDM architecture is the solution. It allows the bandwidths of existing optical networks to be increased by improving optical filtering to increase the quantity of wavelengths transmitted in a single fibre," he added.
Low cost, uncooled, Ridge waveguide, DFB lasers are used for the optical transmission, which the consortium of CST Global, CSC and Kaiam will model, build, test and optimise. The lasers are supplied as known-good-die-on-tape (KGDOT) to Kaiam for packaging, characterisation and qualification.
"The lasers in the CWDM architecture offer reduced power consumption and increased reliability over existing, DWDM architecture solutions," said McKee.
