Pilot Photonics, a start-up based in Dublin, Ireland, secured €2.5M from the European Innovation Council (EIC) to develop, integrate and commercialize key technology blocks relevant to a coherent co-packaged optics (CPO) solution.
Pilot Photonics said it continues to develop a number of its patented technologies including comb lasers, ring resonator IQ modulators and comb-enhanced DSP algorithms. These innovations are relevant to both pluggable and CPO architectures today and can help unlock coherent communication inside the datacentre. They enable datacentre switches at 204.8T and beyond as well as longer reach CPO systems at 10km (LR) distances or more.
The funding is provided through the EIC’s Transition programme and involved a rigorous evaluation process consisting of a highly competitive written proposal stage, followed by an interview stage with a 7-person panel of experts.
“The low-hanging fruit for scaling CPO, namely power splits and coarse wavelength multiplexing is already taken” said Dr. Frank Smyth, founder, and CTO at Pilot Photonics, “This project recognises that continued densification of the interconnects is required for future cloud and AI/ML network scaling. It develops key enabling technologies such as comb laser technology to densify the wavelength grid and ring resonator IQ modulators to increase the information spectral density. We’re excited to get it underway”.
