€13M optical chip projects kicks off

PARADIGM, a €13 million international R&D project to standardise the development and production of optical chips, has begun, with the aim of bringing down the cost of these chips so they can be applied in a wide range of new products.

Most of the money for the project, which is led by Eindhoven University of Technology, comes from the European Commission.

Optical chips that work with light, instead of electronic, signals have the potential to impact many application areas. The increasingly larger data flows in computers and in processors with dozens of arithmetic cores require optical components. And whereas data on the Internet is already transmitted in optical fibres, the signal processing in network nodes is still done with electronic switches.

The PARADIGM project (Photonic Advanced Research and Development for Integrated Generic Manufacturing) involves sixteen academic and industrial partners, including Oclaro, Alcatel-Thales III-V Lab, two Fraunhofer Institutes, Philips Miplaza, CIP, Gooch&Housego, Linkra, Willow Photonics, the universities of Cambridge, Chalmers, Milano and Eindhoven, and three design software companies: Phoenix, Photon Design and Filarete. The COBRA Institute of Eindhoven University of Technology is the project coordinator.

At present the most significant bottleneck holding back the large-scale application of optical chips is the price of developing and manufacturing them. PARADIGM intends to standardize the development and production of optical chips. Meint Smit, professor of Optical Communication Technology at Eindhoven said, “Microelectronics cost a few cents per square millimetre of chip, as the technology is mature and highly standardised. In addition, its development costs are low, because we have sophisticated software for the fast and accurate design of the chips. We should also like to attain that capacity with photonic devices.”

It is particularly products not currently made in large volumes that the project aims to make more than ten times cheaper, as a result of standardisation of design methods and production techniques involved. Companies will be able to build prototypes and get products to market much faster. Smit expects that within six years a large proportion of all optical chips can be made in this standardised manner.

Cheaper production methods will also make new products economically viable. An example is the fibre sensors for monitoring parameters, such as tension in bridges, airplanes or windmill blades, to give warnings against overload.

The researchers also envisage other applications in medical instruments and in computers. Smit says the technology being developed in PARADIGM will be commercially available by 2016.