VPIphotonics Assists QAMeleon, Optical Data Project Created by EU

QAMeleon, a project of the European Union, aims to scale metro and core networks to 128-Gbaud speed with the help of VPIphotonics GmbH and the development of software-defined-networking-enabled transceivers and reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) node architectures that support sliceable and reconfigurable optical data flows.

The four-year project has a budget of almost €8 million ($9.9 million) and is composed of an international consortium of 16 partners across the whole value chain, including academia, hardware/software technology developers, component and system vendors, and network providers. VPIphotonics is taking an active role in the development of the transceiver digital signal processing algorithms that are central to the technological objectives of QAMeleon.

The increasingly volatile traffic stemming from the new internet services sets busy-hour internet on a compound annual growth rate of 36 percent, which drives the market of 200-G shipments and the development of the first 600-G products. While component and system vendors are well underway with the development of their 64-Gbaud portfolio, the enabling technologies to shift to the next gear of 128 Gbaud are urgently being sought. At the same time, telecommunications operators and system vendors target to achieve better quality-of-service and higher bandwidth at the same price for their end users by adopting software-defined networking concepts that will make their networks more efficient and more dynamic.

In this realm, QAMeleon will develop the underlying technology that will enable the next generation of a sliceable bandwidth-variable transponder white box operating at 3 Tb/s and novel colorless, directionless, contention-less, grid-less ROADM node architectures for both metro-core networks and metro-access networks, including emerging 5G applications.

VPIphotonics leads a task where system and component modeling and simulation takes place. The work will constitute the first verification of the proposed system concepts of the project. Heavy interaction with work packages related to components fabrication will take place to aid the design and development cycle and ensure that performance targets are met. VPI will also actively support the experimental verification effort, contributing with researchers and its commercial lab automation software VPIlabExpert in the laboratory and field trial validations of the developed technology.

VPIphotonics is a developer of photonics software.