Cloud applications, 5G and IoT are pushing modern networks over the edge to satisfy the stringent high capacity and low latency demands. Photonic integration is a key enabling technology to tackle the new challenges and to bring new products and services to the market. PICaboo will develop novel building blocks on the InP PIC platform of TUe and III-V Lab based on the generic foundry model aiming to enhance PIC performances and reduce development costs. It will develop compact models of the building blocks and will compile them in PDK-compatible libraries allowing designers to explore their use in a wide range of applications hence maximizing their exploitation potential. PICaboo PIC demonstrators will transform the optical metro and access networks in terms of speed, footprint, power consumption and cost. The high speed EAM-based transmitters will employ all-optical equalization functionality on-chip which will scale PON line rate to 50/100Gb/s reducing the electronic signal pre-processing required for meeting the 29dB power budget of the optical distribution network within the expected dispersion limit. Both single EAM-MZM and coherent EAM-IQM transmitter PICs will leverage power consumption benefits of 50 and 65% respectively compared to 50G EML solutions and overall cost reduction by almost 20%. The dual polarization coherent receiver PIC employs integrated reset-free phase and polarization control allowing for complex DSP functions to be performed directly at the optical domain. In this case, power consumption reduction of more than 30% with concurrent cost benefits 3.6x will be achieved compared to standard coherent transceivers stemming from the use of simplified direct detection DSPs and low-cost tunable lasers, making PICaboo an attractive technology within the 20-80km DCI range. Exploitation of the PIC demonstrators will be pursued by NOKIA and ADVA. VLC will exploit the developed PDK libraries for a fast uptake of PICaboo building blocks by end-users.

DIMENSION establishes a truly integrated electro-optical platform, extending the silicon (Bi)CMOS and silicon photonics platform with III-V photonic functionality. The III-V integration concept is fully CMOS compatible and offers fundamental advantages compared to state-of-the art integration approaches. After bonding and growing ultra-thin III-V structures onto the silicon front-end-of-line, the active optical functions are embedded into the back-end of line stack. This offers great opportunities for new innovative devices and functions at the chip-level but also for the assembly of such silicon devices. As processing takes place on silicon wafers, this project has the unique opportunity to bring the cost of integrated devices, with CMOS, photonic and III-V functionality, down to the cost of silicon volume manufacturing. Such a platform has the potential to allow Europe to take a leading position in the field of high functionality integrated photonics. Moreover, the project demonstrators adhere to standards such as IEEE802.3, 25G optical components and low-power electronics, thus opening a viable route towards ultra-low-cost high-performance optical transceivers for a new era of data centres and cloud systems. DIMENSION will realise three demonstrators: • A short-reach transmitter for intra-datacenter operation addressing the 400 GbE-LR8 (IEEE 802.3bs) standard making use of an array of directly modulated lasers, pulse-amplitude-modulation (PAM4) techniques and 8 wavelength channels in the telecom O-band. • A medium-reach transmitter for inter-datacenter applications beyond the 400 GbE-LR8 (IEEE 802.3bs) standard by providing a tuneable coherent transmitter for inter-datacenter and metro applications for link lengths in excess of 10km using a modulator integrated on the same chip. • A novel laser directly grown on silicon photonics, operated at 25Gb/s in the telecom O-band demonstrating the significant cost-saving potential of the technologies pursued in DIMENSION.