EXCITE · First Scalable Field-Programmable Photonic Gate Array Platform For Photonic Chip Development and Data Centre Switch Applications

Data traffic, compute load and signal processing requirements have grown exponentially in recent decades. However, the performance increases of conventional electronics are no longer adequate to keep up with these increasing demands as Moore’s Law is ending. Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs), harnessing photons instead of electrons to manipulate signals, are widely regarded as the technology of choice to power the next-generation of high performance devices. PICs are commercially available in the form of ASPICs (application-specific photonic integrated circuits). However, with internal circuitry fixed during fabrication they are limited to very specific tasks and are extremely time-consuming and expensive to develop. They are therefore only suitable for extremely high-volume applications. There is an urgent need for an affordable, flexible, reprogrammable alternative to ASPICs, with the same performance benefits, an approach similar to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in conventional electronics. The Field Programmable Photonic Gate Arrays (FPPGAs) we develop are a completely new class of devices that will fundamentally change the economics of ASPIC design. FPPGAs can typically save 90% of the development time and 95% of tape-out costs by testing ASPIC designs inside FPPGAs before production without further iterations, eliminating vast inefficiencies. The flexible on-chip optical signal routing also unlocks novel features like self-optimising circuitry and self-healing properties. This project, EXCITE, will refine, demonstrate and scale up the world’s first commercially-viable FPPGAs as a general-purpose platform technology and make it accessible to the wider developer community. Following on from the successful EIC Transition project INSPIRE, iPronics will now optimise this development platform for mass-manufacturing and demonstrate its benefits in a first application area, data switches for optical signal switching in large data centres.