News Article
Nokia Siemens to Support Development of Optical Ethernet Transponders
The firm is supporting a project to grow InP and GaAs on silicon to advance the progress of integrated coherent transmitters and receivers that deliver a massive amount of aggregate bandwidth.
Nokia Siemens Networks has joined the European Commission’s GALACTICO project to develop compact, cost-efficient, silicon-based photonic circuits for Gigabit Ethernet (GbE).
The three-year research program aims to uniquely blend three of the most established integration materials – InP (Indium Phosphide), GaAs (Gallium Arsenide), and silicon – on a common silicon-based platform.
The project aims to tackle the problem of realising the high-performance, volume production and low-cost requirements of the next generation of GbE, and eventually Terabit, optical transponders.
An optical transponder receives a signal and then processes and re-transmits it at a different frequency.
Apart from Nokia Siemens, the GALACTICO consortium includes nine partners comprising university research centres and leading companies from Greece, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.
“Currently system vendors require their own photonic integration technology to deliver a practical and economically feasible 100 GbE system solution,” said Lars Zimmermann, project coordinator of GALACTICO. “Our project aims to develop low-cost and small size 100 GbE interfaces, and provide integrated coherent transmitters and receivers that deliver a massive amount of aggregate bandwidth.”
“We have been at the forefront of the transition from 10 and 40 gigabit per second (Gbps) networks to 100G and beyond,” said, Uwe Fischer, head of optical networks product management at Nokia Siemens Networks. “It’s no wonder that when the project GALACTICO was initiated, we came forward to lend our expertise. With our expertise in the optical transport domain, we will provide specifications for the components to be developed as well as participate in the ensuing lab demos and field trials.”
GALACTICO is a three-year research project focused on coherent optical communication systems, and is supported by the Seventh Framework Program (FP7), Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) of the European Commission (EC). The total budget of the project is € 4,018,219.00, with €2,900,000.00of that coming from the European Commission.
