Low-power colourless reflective components for energy-efficient optical networks

Exponentially-increasing demands on the current telecommunication infrastructure are driving the development of next-generation ultra-high-bandwidth network architectures with sufficiently low energy consumptions. Within the scope of the EU FP7 C3PO project, we are developing novel, energy-efficient, colourless photonic technologies for metro applications. The colourless transmitters will leverage reflective photonic integrated circuits, specifically reflective electroabsorption modulator-based phase and amplitude modulators, in conjunction with multi-frequency lasers and low-loss piezoelectric beam-steering optical matrix switches, in order to achieve wavelength reconfigurability without the requirement for tuneable lasers. A specific target is a dynamically reconfigurable metro node which supports duobinary modulation for high dispersion tolerance and efficient spectral usage, to enable 100 Gb/s Ethernet dense wavelength-division-multiplexed transport networks. We report on recent progress towards these metro transport networks, providing the latest system test results obtained using novel hybrid photonic integrated devices.