UK and Canada collaborate on optical engine for greener AI
A new UK-Canada technology partnership is building an advanced optical engine designed to make the world’s AI data centres faster, more efficient and more sustainable.
The project is the first major technical collaboration to emerge from the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed earlier this year between the UK’s Compound Semiconductor Applications (CSA) Catapult, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre (CPFC) and the Centre de Collaboration MiQro Innovation (C2MI).
The teams in both countries are now engineering new technology solutions, sharing expertise and building a new end-to-end supply chain for photonics applications.
Funded with £400,000 from the UKRI Technology Missions Fund, delivered by Innovate UK, the organisations will develop a Co-Packaged Optical Engine – technology that integrates multiple optical components into a single package to handle extreme data loads with far lower power consumption.
Training and running AI systems requires huge amounts of electricity, and data centre energy use is rising quickly.
The new optical engine aims to support higher bandwidth, lower latency and reduced power consumption – laying the foundations for more sustainable, high-performance AI systems.
CSA Catapult’s recent visit to Canada highlighted how the UK supply chain can fill critical gaps and where Canadian expertise accelerates UK innovation. This led to establishing the new joint project, and it has already attracted international attention.
The partnership and new project were presented at the G7 this year as an example of countries moving beyond intent and actively working together to deliver practical, real-world innovation.
The optical engine will be validated at CSA Catapult’s Future Telecoms Hub in Bristol before being tested on JOINER, an international experimentation platform born out of the UK, which allows new hardware to be trialled under realistic operating conditions.
Joe Gannicliffe, head of photonics and RF at CSA Catapult, said: “By linking our UK design skills and expertise with Canada’s outstanding laser fabrication and assembly capabilities, we’re creating a robust and exciting new trans-Atlantic supply chain and developing ground-breaking optical hardware that will help AI run faster and more sustainably.
“The technology demonstrator we’ll create will have been tested in the lab and in real world, and UK companies working with us will be able to access and build on this in future, helping them integrate next-generation optical technology into their own systems and strengthening the UK’s position within a growing global market.”
