Effect Photonics tapes out world’s first fully-integrated coherent PIC

Effect Photonics from Eindhoven has taped out what it claims to be “the world’s first fully-integrated coherent photonic integrated circuit”. Coherent in this context means a method of optical transmission using modulation of amplitude and phase of the light, as well as transmission across two polarizations. This enables higher bandwidths.

The PIC called Manta fully integrates an ultra-narrow-linewidth full-band-tunable laser, 64 gigabaud coherent receiver, 64 gigabaud coherent transmitter, wavelength locking and on-chip amplification for the transmit and receive paths. This gives unprecedented optical signal-to-noise ratio performance with power consumption lower than a stand-alone integrable tunable laser assembly, says Effect Photonics. Manta is targeted at edge and metro/access networks.

“In some approaches, the most costly functionalities, notably the laser, amplification and wavelength locking, aren’t integrated, and this creates optical loss, higher cost and higher assembly complexity. Truly integrating everything allows us to overcome those hurdles and create a high-performance, low-power consumption, low-cost solution for coherent,” comments Tim Koene, VP Engineering at Effect Photonics.