£1M development project award to UK datacomms consortium

12th September 2017

The Compound Semiconductor Centre (CSC) announces the award of a £1.1M Collaborative R+D project under the recent InnovateUK Emerging and Enabling Technologies Call.  Project SUPER8: (A scalable 200Gb/s Super-thermal, 8 channel CWDM architecture) will focus on the development of new ultra-high speed transceiver platform to service the enormous growth market in optical data communications in hyper-scale Cloud data centres.

The consortium comprising CSC (Cardiff), Kaiam (Livingston) and Compound Semiconductor Technologies (Glasgow) will collaborate to deliver a commercial grade solution with the target of transfer to high volume manufacturing in a timescale of 30 months.

CSC Project Lead, Dr Wyn Meredith commented, ‘The adoption of cloud services, video on demand and emerging IoT services are driving a massively expanding global data bandwidth demand. The UK is already a major player in the supply of high performance compound semiconductor materials and components that underpin the global communications network. However, next generation high capacity networks will require higher transmission rate, lower cost transceiver solutions. This project will deliver an ‘all UK’ developed and manufactured solution which leverages world class compound semiconductor materials and device expertise at CSC and CST with Kaiam’s highly innovative Photonic Integrated Circuit technology.

About the Compound Semiconductor Centre (CSC)

The Compound Semiconductor Centre was founded in 2015 as a Joint Venture between Cardiff University and IQE Plc, with the mission of accelerating commercialisation of Compound Semiconductor Materials and Device Research, and realising a tangible economic return on the UK Public and Private investment in this key area of enabling technology. Based in Cardiff, the Centre is a vital milestone towards developing a World-class Compound Semiconductor cluster in South Wales.

About Compound Semiconductor Technologies (CST)

Compound Semiconductor Technologies Global Ltd (CST Global) of Hamilton (near Glasgow), Scotland, UK is an independent supplier of high volume compound semiconductor optoelectronic foundry solutions including communications sources such as Distributed Feedback (DFB) lasers, gain chips and optical amplifiers.

About Kaiam

Kaiam is a high performance transceiver manufacturer headquartered in Newark, California, with a primary manufacturing plant in Livingston, Scotland. Kaiam's core technology is smart photonic integration, where standard and mature manufacturing tools can be used to assemble optical integrated circuits with consistent performance, scalability, and cost.

Source: http://www.compoundsemiconductorcentre.com/in-the-press-historic-signing-seals-worlds-first-compound-semiconductor-cluster-in-south-east-wales