On July 20th 2021 the H2020 PASSION project had his final review meeting with the EC. PASSION is coordinated by Prof. Pierpaolo Boffi of Politecnico di Milano's Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria and the consortium has 11 EU partners (including Politecnico) and 3 Asian ones.
The 42-month project demonstrated an application driven photonic platform for the development of a new generation of low-cost, energy-efficient and reduced-footprint devices and sub-systems, for signal generation, detection and switching, driving new technological paths for metropolitan applications, with an expected impact in short-medium reach communications, where cost reduction and energy sustainability are mandatory. Scalability and modularity are PASSION key features to easily upgrade the network, according to traffic demands, with a pay-as-you-grow approach.
PASSION realised the sliceable bandwidth/bitrate variable transceiver (S-BVT) transmitter (Tx) module integrating 40 low-cost energy-efficient laser sources such as InP VCSELs in a single silicon photonics chip and enabling up to 2-Tb/s aggregated capacity. By combining four modules, a full 160-channel Tx supermodule is obtained with 25-GHz granularity over the whole C band and with up to 8-Tb/s capacity. By exploiting also polarisation-division multiplexing and spatial multiplexing with bundles of fibres or multi-core fibres, PASSION Tx is able to reach a capacity per link higher than 100 Tb/s exploiting coherent detection. The PASSION network platform also includes an innovative energy-efficient and small-footprint node approach, adopting flex-grid aggregation/disaggregation/add switches, high-connectivity multicast switches (MCS), and large-port photonic polymer PLC-based space switch matrixes. Such a S-BVT based network architecture guarantees reconfigurability, flexibility and scalability where the developed SDN controller ensures network programmability, fitting network operator requirements and roadmaps.
PASSION solutions will support a sustainable communications infrastructure in terms of cost and energy consumption, ensuring the effective transmission and routing of a huge amount of data in our cities. PASSION will strengthen the European industrial leadership in optical communications and it will support a highly connected and communicating society with important social and economic benefits.
