OCTAPUS aims to deliver an agile, low-cost and energy efficient PIC technology framework that will re-architect the NGCO (Next Generation Central Offices) ecosystem, transparently upgrading its capacity to 51.2Tb/s and beyond, through an innovative optically switched backplane and transceiver toolkit. To achieve its mission, OCTAPUS targets on the following objectives:
- to deploy novel non-volatile antimony (Sb) phase change materials (PCMs) to develop a range of zero-power and ultra-low loss Si3N4-based electro-refractive switches, featuring ns-scale reconfigurability with 2 orders of magnitude lower losses compared to conventional GST PCMs,
- to develop an energy- and cost-efficient O-band 50 GHz component and I/O portfolio and demonstrate up-to 800 G optical transceiver engines for board-to-board and long-reach PON communication with an impressive 4× and 8× energy consumption improvement against respective state-of-the-art solutions and up to 37.5% cost reduction,
- to deploy a pool of advanced optical components to demonstrate a low-power and ultra-fast reconfigurable optically enabled backplane technology for NGCOs,
- to exploit its optically enabled backplane technology to architect a low-energy, high-capacity, scalable and SDN-reconfigurable NGCO ecosystem offering deterministic service guarantees (TSN controlled) for time-sensitive traffic while providing reliable and ultra-low latency communications for telecom and industrial applications,
- to demonstrate a scalable NGCO architecture with up-to 200 Tb/s capacity and validate its advanced optical component technologies through a series of lab and field trials in time-sensitive applications scenarios.
