Tyndall to Lead $6M Project on Photonic Circuits for Data Transmission

Tyndall National Institute will lead a consortium of researchers in a three-year, €5.2 million (about $5.95 million) European Union-funded project to develop photonic circuits for faster, cheaper data transmission.

The Thermally Integrated Smart Photonics Systems (TIPS) project is funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020 program and includes industry and research partners from Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and France.

Dr. Kafil M. Razeeb, coordinator of the Thermally Integrated Smart Photonics Systems (TIPS) project, and Dr. Cian O’Murchu. Courtesy of Tyndall National Institute.

With an anticipated 11.5 billion mobile-ready devices in the world by 2020 and the increasing connectivity of those devices through the Internet of Things, current operational bandwidth will be insufficient to cope with Europe’s data demands.

“We will seek to develop an intelligent circuit that can thermally control its own operations, making it up to 5 times more efficient,” said TIPS coordinator Dr. Kafil M. Razeeb, a senior research scientist at Tyndall. “By precisely self-tuning its own temperature, the device can produce a more precise wavelength, meaning faster data transmission at a lower cost.”

Project partners include III-V Lab, the University of Hamburg, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs Ireland and France, three institutes of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Stokes Institute at the University of Limerick, LioniX BV and Communicraft Ltd.

Hosting the only full facilities in Ireland for CMOS integrated circuit construction and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and III-V semiconductor wafer fabrication, Tyndall prototypes new product opportunities for the electronics, medical devices, energy and communications industries.

Located at University College Cork, Tyndall employs more than 460 people and generates around €30M income each year, 85 percent from competitively won contracts nationally and internationally.

For more information, visit www.tyndall.ie.