Ericsson creates silicon photonic chip for the cloud and 5G era

The new chip increases bandwidth, reduces costs and allows the incorporation of optical routing for the cloud and 5G era.

The IRIS project, led by Ericsson Italy has developed a silicon photonic switch designed to house thousands of optical circuits on a single chip.

The first chip is already in the testing and characterization phase. If the result is successful, it would be a major breakthrough for the industry, inaugurating a new generation of optical systems integrated into a single device.

Silicon photonics uses silicon as a miniature optical medium to transmit and switch data at very high speeds, reducing energy consumption and environmental impact, and increasing capacity, which, combined, will result in lower operating costs.

This chip will allow operators to increase network performance, increasing the nodal capacity required by future 5G and cloud networks. This can be achieved through large-scale integration of features such as high-speed transmission, switching, and interconnectivity on the same chip.

The IRIS project is co-funded by the European Commission as a Targeted Research Specific Project (STREP) within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Development (FP7), and aims to create a high-capacity, reconfigurable WDM photonic switch using silicon photonics to integrate circuits monolithically on a single chip.

Ericsson's award-winning Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 is an example that demonstrates that silicon photonics technology is already being put into practice. With its optical interconnection, it brings significant benefits to data center operators in terms of total cost of ownership.

Peter Christy, Research Director at 451 Research, said: "Optical interconnect will play an essential role in the evolution of data centres. Silicon photonics significantly increases cost and energy efficiency. Ericsson's cloud initiative and HDS 800 are pioneers in the commercialization of silicon photonics in data centers, and systems like this clearly demonstrate their technological potential."

Ericsson researchers in Pisa have created and managed all the important patent proposals.
The project consortium is led by Ericsson Italia and consists of ST Microelectronics (Italy), CEA-LETI (France), CNIT (Italy), University of Trento (Italy), Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Spain), Technische Universität Wien (Austria) and the Research Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications of the Republic of Korea.