The HIPERION consortium has been assembled to answer the call LC-SC3-RES-15-2019: Increase the competitiveness of the EU PV manufacturing industry. The goal of the project is to bring to fruition at the industrial scale a validated high efficiency module-level innovation, based on a disruptive planar optical micro-tracking technology, which concentrates sunlight on multijunction solar cells, mounted on top of a conventional silicon backplate. The resulting high efficiency solar modules (>30% STC under direct sunlight) with a standard flat panel form factor can be mounted on any standard racks or rooftops. The technology has been extensively demonstrated with outdoor tests and pilot installations. It must be now industrialized for mass production, to enable its integration by manufacturers in their existing production lines. The project will demonstrate at pilot-line level the assembly of these high efficiency modules, while several commercial pilot sites across Europe and qualification tests will further validate the performance and reliability. To achieve successfully this 48-month, 13 M€ valued action, a consortium of 16 members representing 9 European countries has been gathered. It includes several industrial players with the key expertise to develop the assembly processes, and some of the most renown European PV centers with strong know-how on design and qualification. A solar manufacturer will do a detailed economical evaluation on the integration of the technology in the production line, while several solar installers will represent both the rooftop and utility end markets. With its novel module architecture and innovative manufacturing processes, HIPERION has the potential to drastically reduce solar electricity costs by significantly boosting the efficiency. It could allow EU PV manufacturers to gain a clear competitive advantage against mainstream solar modules and to regain market shares on the growing PV market.

Photonic technologies are key enablers to satisfy the requirements of future Terabit/s communication satellites. The ability of Photonics to handle high data rates and frequencies is critical in this scenario, where current purely RF technologies are limited in SWaP and performance. However, the use of photonics devices is currently restricted to a few demonstrations in non-critical equipment and with limited degree of integration. PhLEXSAT will increase the maturity level of several key photonic devices and modules to TRL5, designing, fabricating and testing 1) Photonic sampler, 2) ultra-low jitter photonic clock for precise sampling, 3) Photonic-assisted ADC and DAC for digital channelizers for Q/V-band operation and 4) on-board digital processing firmware. Miniaturization will be achieved by fabricating and integrating a modulator photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and high-linear photodiode PIC with electronics in the photonic ADC and DAC components. PhLEXSAT will integrate and demonstrate such building blocks in a test bed proving the suitability of the proposed architecture for Tbps-like, software defined HTS payloads with hundreds of channels with flexible bandwidth allocation up to 1GHz/channel, demonstrating a flexible photo-digital channelizer for high capacity reconfigurable payloads, enabling flexible frequency plans and channelization and dynamic coverage for Ku/Ka/Q/V operation. PhLEXSAT consortium comprises the multidisciplinary skills needed to achieve its objectives and fully exploit its results, with partners representing the whole value chain, from space-grade hardware developers to communications satellite integrators and operators. PhLEXSAT builds on the results of the previous FP7 project PHASER and is complementary to developments made by its partners in previous and existing ESA and EC Projects. PhLEXSAT success will contribute to enhance EU competitiveness and non-n-dependence by developing critical technologies for the EU satellite industry.

AMBROSIA aims to provide the foundations for a multi-sensing future-proof Point of Care Unit for sepsis diagnosis offered by a CMOS compatible toolkit and enhanced by on-chip photonic neural network technology to provide an accurate and rapid diagnosis. AMBROSIA will be investing in the established ultra-small-footprint and elevated sensitivity of integrated plasmo-photonic sensors reinforced by the well-known on-chip slow-light effect and micro-transfer printed lasers and photodiodes on Si3N4, as well as the functional processing and classification portfolio of integrated photonic neural network engines, towards painting the landscape of the next-coming disruption in sensor evolution, tailoring them in System-in-Package prototype assemblies, with the sensors being cheap disposable pluggable modules that can rapidly and accurately diagnose sepsis at the bedside in clinical environments. AMBROSIA targets to demonstrate a Point of Care Unit incorporating: i) a switchable sensor area array, with each sensor area facilitating a pluggable, 8-channel label-free plasmo-photonic sensor for sepsis diagnosis with a sensitivity over 130.000nm/RIU and a Limit of Detection below 10-8 RIU for each interferometric sensor, ii) an embedded Si3N4 photonic neural network processing and classifying at the same time the data from at least 7 biomarkers with zero-power providing in the first minutes an accurate and rapid diagnosis for sepsis, iii) Micro-transfer printed lasers and photodetectors on chip that will drastically decrease costs of both the sensing and neural network modules, and render the sensor arrays disposable.

DYNAMOS develops fast (1 ns) and widely tunable (>110 nm) lasers, energy-efficient (~ fJ/bit), broadband (100 GHz) electro-optic modulators, and high-speed (1 ns) broadcast-and-select packet switches as photonic integrated circuits (PICs). DYNAMOS meets the expected outcome objectives and call scope by proposing the development of low energy (few pJ/bit) PICs, which are integrated into modular and scalable subsystems, and subsequently utilized to demonstrate novel data centre networks with highly deterministic sub-microsecond latency to enable maximum congestion reduction, full bisection bandwidth (lower congestion) and guaranteed quality of service while reducing cost per Gbps. The proposed network offers optical circuit switched reconfiguration and guaranteed (contention-less) full-bisection bandwidth, allowing any computational node to communicate to any other node at full-capacity. DYNAMOS builds on recent developments in III-V optoelectronics, thick silicon-on-insulator waveguide technology, and silicon organic hybrid (SOH) modulators. It co-develops the entire ecosystem of transceivers, switches and networks to boost overall performance and to reducing the total cost of data exchange, instead of focusing on the improvement of individual optical links or interfaces. The objectives of DYNAMOS perfectly match the major photonics research & innovations challenges defined in the Photonics21 Multiannual Strategic Roadmap 2021-2027.