Over the last 20 years, femtosecond lasers have led to a host of novel scientific and industrial instrumentation enabling the direct measurement of optical frequencies and the realization of optical clocks, a Nobel Prize winning technology. Initially developed for fundamental science, the potential of femtosecond lasers for a wide range of cross-disciplinary applications has been demonstrated, including e.g. those in optical telecommunication, photonic analog-to-digital conversion, ultra-high precision signal sources for the upcoming quantum technologies and broadband optical spectroscopy in the environmental or bio-medical sciences and many more. Although, impressive cross-disciplinary demonstrations of the potential of femtosecond lasers are numerous, the technology has been hampered by its large size and high cost per system. The existing mode-locked semiconductor diode laser technology does not fulfil the needed performance specifications. The aim of the FEMTOCHIP project is to deliver a fully integrated chip-scale mode-locked laser with pulse energy, peak power and jitter specifications of a shoebox sized fiber laser system enabling a large fraction of the above-mentioned applications. Key challenges addressed are large cross-section, high gain, low background loss waveguide amplifiers, low loss passive waveguide technology and chirped waveguide gratings to accommodate high pulse peak power, to suppress Q-switching instabilities and to implement short pulse production by on-chip dispersion compensation and artificial saturable absorption. Therefore, the FEMTOCHIP consortium is composed of leaders in CMOS compatible ultra-low loss integrated SiN-photonics, rare-earth gain media development and deposition technology as well as ultrafast laser physics and technology for design, simulation and characterization to identify and address the key challenges in demonstrating a highly stable integrated femtosecond laser with table-top performance.

NEBULA aims to provide the foundations for a common future-proof transceiver technology platform with ultra-high bandwidth capabilities offered by a CMOS compatible toolkit and tailored towards meeting performance, cost and energy metrics in both inter-DCI coherent and intra-DCI ASIC co-packaged optics. NEBULA will be investing in the established bandwidth- and energy saving credentials of plasmonic modulator solutions together with the functional digital processing portfolio of neuromorphic optical reservoir computing engines towards painting the landscape of the next-coming disruption in transceiver evolution, tailoring them in System-in-Package prototype assemblies that can intersect with the challenging framework of both inter- and intra-DCI segments. NEBULA target to demonstrate i) a fully-functional 8-channel 112Gbaud 16QAM C-band transceiver prototype, offering an aggregate capacity of 3.2Tbps and requiring just 2.65W per single 400Gbps wavelength, providing in this way an energy efficiency of only 6.625pJ/bit with energy savings of 93% compared to current 200Gbps and 19W-consuming pluggable optics and ii) a fully-functional sub-Volt 8-channel 112Gbaud PAM4 O-band transmitter co-packaged with a data generating ASIC from Mellanox, offering a 1.6Tbps aggregate capacity with up to 37% energy savings compared to the estimated power requirements of respective Si-photonic-based co-packaged solutions.

The Sensing and Communication markets are predicted to increase tremendously over the next few years, especially pushed from medical instrumentation, diagnostics, autonomous driving, quantum computing and communication. Photonic Integration, the ability to shrink complex optical systems on a small chip, is one of the key technologies with an enabling and highly disruptive potential in those verticals. LIGENTEC has developed a unique thick Silicon Nitride (SiN) technology which enables the manufacturing of Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) at better performance and lower cost than common approaches. The technology has reached TRL 7 and gained a lot of customer traction in prototyping. LIGENTEC has estimated its serviceable available market in the Sensing and Communication segments of €400m by 2023 and €1.5bn by 2027 respectively. First customers are ready to enter volume manufacturing in 2022/2023. This EIC project focus is to industrialise the manufacturing processes and prepare for scale-up including a quality control line for production and certify the technology to industry standards. It is strategic to the company as it enables LIGENTEC to enter the volume market. At the end of this project LIGENTEC will: • Have World leading PIC technology for quantum, LiDAR and Space vertical at industrial scale • Setup and validated a quality control and metrology line • Have certified reference designs to industry standards allowing easier design for customers enabling new applications in new markets • Be ready to enter volume market and acquire customers with a need of PICs up to 1’000’000 units / year • Have demonstrated increased production repeatability, yield and proven product reliability LIGENTEC is managed by an experienced team which has successfully scaled a high-tech business in photonics in the past.

High-speed digital signal processing (DSP) has seen tremendous performance increases over the last years, primarily driven by massive parallelization of logic operations in large-scale CMOS circuits. This has led to digital processors that would allow for real-time processing of ultra-broadband signals with analogue bandwidths of hundreds of GHz already today. Acquisition of such signals, however, is still impossible due to limited bandwidth scalability of conventional analogue-to-digital converters (ADC). Within TeraSlice, we will explore and demonstrate concepts that can overcome these limitations by photonically assisted spectral parallelization of ADC interfaces, thereby enabling conversion of waveforms with bandwidths in excess of 300 GHz with the potential for further scalability beyond 1 THz. The TeraSlice approach is disruptive both on a conceptual level and with respect to the underlying devices, comprising low-phase-noise Kerr comb generators and ultra-fast electro-optic modulators. The concept has the potential to disrupt a variety of highly relevant applications with substantial market potential, ranging from radar systems and wireless communications beyond 5G to electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. TeraSlice builds upon an interdisciplinary effort of internationally leading academic and industrial partners with highly complementary expertise. The project covers the theoretical base and the associated quantitative system models, the design, implementation, and test of crucial components and subsystems, as well as application demonstrations of the envisaged ADC scheme, for which we will reach out to other scientific fields such as medical diagnostics. Special focus will be on technological concepts for chip-scale integration – a key aspect for any technical application of the scheme. Based on a successful demonstration of the TeraSlice concept, foundation of a start-up is envisaged as a realistic scenario for exploitation of the results.

MOICANA aims to deploy a versatile, low-cost and large-volume manufacturing transmitter PIC technology by monolithically integrating InP QD laser structures on a passive SiN waveguide platform and demonstrating a whole new series of high-performance cooler-less transmitter modules for a broad range of applications. MOICANA will invest in the best-in-class materials for the active and passive photonic functions, synergizing InP QD laser structures with the low-loss and temperature-tolerant SiN waveguide platform. It will grow InP QD layers directly on Si substrates and will proceed to Selective Area Growth on SiN chips, aiming at the fabrication and deployment of a whole new series of transmitter modules as monolithically integrated PICs: a) 25GbE SFP28 pluggable Directly Modulated Laser (DML), b) a WDM 100GbE QSFP28 pluggable DML, c) Externally Modulated Lasers, and d) a coherent tunable laser source. In this effort, MOICANA will deploy sophisticated integrated InP QD-on-SiN structures including 25Gb/s DMLs, low-linewidth DFBs and electro-optic modulators and will combine them into versatile and highly scalable transmitter layouts exploiting the rich and low-loss passive function portfolio of the SiN waveguide platform. Its transmitter PIC prototypes will be demonstrated in a broad range of applications in the areas of Data Center Interconnects, 5G mobile fronthaul and coherent communications, highlighting its versatility perspectives and its powerful credentials to form the transmitter technology for many-years-to-go. Finally, MOICANA’s technology will be supported by an EDA software design kit library and PDKs that will be deployed withint its duration, paving the way for a standardized and fabless PIC transmitter eco-system with immediate market take-up capabilities.