02.05.19 – Professor Tobias Kippenberg has won a Proof of Concept grant from the European Research Council.

The Proof of Concept (PoC) grants are given annually by the European Research Council (ERC) to researchers who already hold other ERC grants, in a range of research fields “from new health therapies to regenerate nerves, to prototyping soft robotic system for industrial handling, to building a charity that will promote welfare and job quality of digital workers of so-called ‘gig economy’.” Set up in 2011, the PoC grants are worth up to €150,000 and can be used for different purposes, including establishing intellectual property rights, investigating business opportunities, or conducting technical validation.

This year, the ERC has given 54 PoC grants. One of the winners is Tobias J. Kippenberg, Professor at EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements. Kippenberg is a pioneer in the field of cavity quantum optomechanics and photonic-integrated optical frequency combs based on optical microresonators, which can confine light in an extremely small space and guide it. His research has demonstrated that the faint forces exerted by lasers can be used to measure and cool mechanical movements in the quantum regime, and led to a compact chip-scale frequency combs for spectroscopy, frequency metrology and telecommunications.

Project summary

Photonic Integrated Microcombs as Multi-wavelength Sources for Edge Data Centers (PhoMEC)

Over the past ten years the Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements (LPQM) has developed and pioneered microcombs – photonic integrated optical frequency combs (OFC) – providing access to equidistant optical carriers. Due to their broad bandwidth, high repetition rates, compactness and wafer-scale fabrication, such microcombs represent a novel disruptive technology with a proven track record. While their advantages were shown in ultrafast ranging (LIDAR), high speed coherent telecommunications, as well as chip-scale atomic clocks and frequency synthesizers, the technology is not yet commercially available and only present in a few research laboratories worldwide.

Recent LPQM advances have led to the development of unique proprietary Si₃N₄ microfabrication processes for ultra-low power microcombs, and allowed in-house photonic packaging. Taken together, the laboratory is now able to implement the full cycle production of a packaged microcomb ready for integration into a commercial product.

We aim to bring the technology to the market by building and promoting a rack-mountable microcomb unit with 100 GHz channel spacing matching the ITU frequency grid over C- and L- telecom bands. The key market segments of the proposed microcomb unit are enterprise and edge data centers, facing growing data traffic and requiring WDM sources for high-speed interconnects.

The product will be tested in collaboration with Microsoft UK in an actual data center application as a WDM source for optical circuit switching. We also plan to showcase the technology to Huawei and Nokia Bell Labs who expressed interest in testing. Beyond field-testing with industry partners, the system will be shown at international industry trade fairs to address key stakeholders.

The project aims to incorporate a dedicated start-up to exploit the technologies. This endeavor can be realistically achieved in view of the IP position that EPFL has developed in microcombs and the recent spin-off LIGENTEC that offers SiN foundry services.