How time flies! It's been a busy few months at Pilot since our last newsletter. We've had very successful shows at both Photonics West, and OFC, a very fruitful visit to Laser Munich and now we're gearing up for ECOC.
How time flies! It's been a busy few months at Pilot since our last newsletter. We've had very successful shows at both Photonics West, and OFC, a fruitful visit to Laser Munich and now we're gearing up for ECOC. At Photonics West we announced our latest product development - the world's fastest switching low linewidth tunable laser - and the reaction has been fantastic. We've completed one European project, commenced another, published several new papers, and had a couple of patents granted. In this newsletter, we give a quick roundup of some of those items, along with a slightly longer-form piece on integrated comb lasers for coherent optical networks. We hope you enjoy!
Integrated Comb Lasers for Next Generation Coherent Optical Networks
Coherent optical networks have met the challenge of sustained growth in traffic demand by increasing the data rate on single wavelength channels. However continually increasing baud rates has become prohibitively challenging and expensive while increasing the constellation size quickly limits the transmission reach. For these reasons, coherent channels based on multiple parallel wavelengths are emerging to facilitate continued bandwidth growth and to keep pace with ethernet optics. Today, dual-wavelength channels implemented with individual lasers are available, however as channel counts increase using integrated comb lasers can offer additional benefits over individual lasers.
Integrated comb lasers deliver multiple coherent wavelengths from a single chip or package. In high capacity core networks, since all of the wavelengths are frequency locked, intra channel guard bands can be minimized or eliminated allowing capacity to be maximised. And because the wavelengths are all phase related, the DSP can be simplified, and transmission impairments can be compensated. On the other hand, in edge aggregation networks where cost and power are more critical, a single comb-based terminal located at the hub can distribute fractions of the line rate as individual optical carriers to slower receivers while remaining compatible with standard optical line systems (OLS) in terms of WDM grid and routing options. Reductions in cost, size, power and complexity offered by integrated comb lasers in comparison to multiple individual lasers also make them a... Read more
EU Programmes: "PICOMB" completes and "ADOPTION" commences
We have recently completed "PICOMB", an SME Instrument Phase 2 project (now the EIC Accelerator). Unusually for European programmes this scheme supports single-entities rather than collaborative projects and is intended to help the most innovative SMEs in Europe to develop their innovations and scale. The project was very successful and led to Pilot more than doubling its workforce, raising significant new VC investment, developing new capabilities and partnerships, and ultimately securing evaluation requests from several Tier 1 customers for our integrated comb laser assembly (iCLA) which are now getting underway.
As PICOMB completed, ADOPTION commenced. ADOPTION is a Horizon Europe Innovation Action focussed on co-packaged optics (CPO). It involves 10 partners from across Europe and a budget of around €6.4m. Pilot’s role will be to deliver the multi-wavelength light sources for the project and we are developing both laser array, and comb laser approaches.
New Patents and Publications
We have had some recent successes with newly granted patents and new publications.
Our patent application for a fast, high-resolution optical spectrometer based on two overlapped integrated comb lasers has been granted in both Europe and the US. Patenting can be a slow process – these patents were filed in 2018! Nonetheless, patents are an important way of capturing and crystalising the value of all of the R&D efforts and we have built a significant IP portfolio consisting of both internally developed and licensed/acquired IP.
We also recently published a joint paper with Adtran (formerly ADVA Optical Networking) at Optica's Signal Processing in Photonic Communications (SPPCom) meeting in South Korea. The paper was entitled "Advancements and Applications of Comb-Based Transceivers in Coherent Optical Networks" and we’re working with Adtran to explore and prove out the potential of our integrated comb laser technology.
Finally, we have had a number of technical papers published recently covering our broad range of technologies including:
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