Adva to participate in project to reduce power consumption in optical networks

Norcross, GA and Martinsried/Munich, Germany--Continuing deployment of telecommunications networks drives up power and energy consumption such that current energy levels may constrain future communications growth. As a result, Adva Optical Networking has been selected to participate in a research project focused on the development of a new generation of photonic components that will reduce power consumption and costs. Named "Colorless and Coolerless Components for Low-Power Optical Networks" (C-3PO), the grant-based project is focused on increasing communications-network capacity for the next generation of optical-networking applications.

Currently, individual optical components consume a large amount of power--up to tens of watts per component--and making the components larger to accommodate future network capacity needs will only increase the level of power required. In addition, as components run hotter, the energy required to cool the buildings that house the infrastructure can increase power consumption by as much as a factor of six.

Coolerless, colorless
To address this problem, participants in the C-3PO project will develop cost-effective, coolerless, silica-based integrated components that are not wavelength-specific (thus the term "colorless"), but that have high performance for dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing (DWDM) applications.

The deliverables at the end of the three-year project will include low-cost, photonic-integrated transceivers, which eliminate the need for expensive, thermoelectrically cooled tunable lasers. An additional outcome will be an approach to electronics/photonics integration via novel electronic-chip devices that are performance-optimized for low power consumption and that imitate integration with the arrays of integrated optical devices. These new components are projected to deliver large savings on equipment in any given year, up to hundreds of millions of dollars for data and switching-center applications alone.

Other participants in the project include:
--University College Cork/Tyndall National Institute (Ireland)
--CIP Technologies (United Kingdom)
--IMEC (Belgium)
--Potalis (United Kingdom)
--Constelex (Greece)

C-3PO is a three-year project focused on metro and access networks that kicked off in June 2010 and is supported by the European Commission's (EC) Seventh Framework Program (FP7). As part of that larger EC initiative, C-3PO is housed within the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) program's photonics efforts. The total budget for the project is EUR 2.6 million, with EUR 2 million of that coming from the European Union.