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Effect Photonics’ optical transceivers tune in to the market8 Effect Photonics’ optical transceivers tune in to the market
Effect Photonics’ optical transceivers tune in to the market
It’s been quite the journey, but Effect Photonics is fi nally ready to take the telecom market by storm with its tunable optical transceivers. In doing so, it will give the Dutch Photondelta integrated photonics ecosystem a most welcome boost, too.
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Paul van Gerven
In January 2011, Boudewijn Docter and colleagues from E ect Photonics left a Silicon Valley building thinking they would never hear from the internet company again. Sure, it had been a good meeting, if a little short – their appointment, a former colleague of Docter’s, couldn’t spare them more than half an hour. But a small Dutch startup with no track record to speak of snaring one of the world’s largest internet companies as its rst customer? at seemed a little too good to be true.
“Yet, to our big surprise, one week later, we got an email, asking when we were planning to submit our proposal,” tells Docter, who together with Tim Koene founded E ect Photonics in 2009. Only then, the Eindhoven-based team took a closer look at what their potential customer actually wanted, and whether they could make that happen. “We concluded that the photonic integrated circuit – our core business – was feasible, but its packaging would be a major issue. e kind of sophisticated packaging we needed simply didn’t exist at the time. However, we did have some ideas on how to cost-e ectively develop one,” explains Docter, currently serving as president of the company.
Co-funded by their new-found Silicon Valley patron, E ect Photonics started developing an integrated optical transceiver that can send sixteen di erent data streams over a single optical ber cable. is would enable every ber internet user to have his own dedicated bandwidth, without giving him his own ber cable. Clearly, that would be a major step up from users having to share the connection to their provider with a number of neighbors, resulting in performance loss during peak internet hours.
But after a couple of years, E ect Photonics’ customer had scaled up its ber ambitions and decided it didn’t want to wait for new technology after all. When it pulled the plug on the project in 2014, “we thought that was the end of the company,” says Docter.
Photondelta’s growth strategy
Photondelta was set up in January 2019 to boost the emerging Dutch integrated- photonics industry. Its mission: to drive growth in terms of turnover (over 1 billion euros), resources (over 4,000 FTE) and number of participating companies (more than 25) by 2026. ese goals are already very challenging considering the relatively limited time frame and resources, but on top of that, Photondelta has to operate in a double- trouble environment: an emerging new technology with (long-term) potential in likewise new emerging applications and markets.
To face this complexity, Photondelta identi ed four key target markets: medical devices & life sciences, datacom & telecom, infrastructure & transportation and agriculture & food. First, the organization performed a thorough analysis of relevant key trends, drivers and unmet needs by meeting with key prospective customers on a global level. eir unmet needs were then matched with the cluster’s current and future product and technological capabilities. is resulted, at the end of last year, in the identi cation and prioritization, based on growth potential, of a limited number of key areas where Photondelta has the potential to further build and expand its portfolio of promising and di erentiating solutions and where to focus on to e ectively and e ciently target growth.
Earlier this year, dedicated focal area teams, sta ed with business and technology experts from companies and knowledge institutes or purposely hired, have been set up and chartered to further sharpen relevant propositions and business/technology roadmaps, in open collaboration with global leading customers and end-users. ese insights will drive further expansion of the portfolio o ering, acquisition of new customers and cluster partners, as well as guide further Photondelta investments. e focal area discussed in this article is called “Optical transceivers for ultra-high data transfer for short-haul/metro telecom ber-based access networks/datacenters.”
It wasn’t. It took another couple of years and some more twists and turns, but Effect Photonics is now moving integrated optical transceivers into production and onto the market. “It has taken us quite a while, but all those years of work have resulted in something much more than a product: we have a technology platform that allows us to create a range of products, each tailored for a specific application. This is exactly what we’ll be doing in the next few years: launching products aimed at the many different telecom applications out there.”
On the map
That’s good news for Effect Photonics but also for the integrated-photonics industry as a whole. Companies like Effect Photonics moving into volume production – and Docter is convinced the volume is there in telecom – will boost the momentum of the technology, allowing it to fan out in other application areas. “It’s like how things evolved in electronics. Chips were originally developed to power computers, but once an industry of a certain size had been established, people started using chips for other
applications. This is how it will happen in integrated photonics as well.”
The Dutch integrated-photonics ecosystem, in particular, stands to gain from the steps Effect Photonics is about to take, even though none of the companies in it have a need for transceivers themselves. United in the public-private openinnovation partnership called Photondelta, these companies are looking to establish a world-leading integrated-photonics industry in the Netherlands (see inset “Photondelta’s growth strategy”). Effect Photonics is working with several partners in the network, increasing not just their business activity but also the knowledge and experience they need to keep moving forward. The progress that Effect Photonics is making, therefore, represents a very tangible boost to the maturation of the ecosystem.
Conversely, Photondelta has played an important role in getting Effect Photonics where it is today, says Docter. Apart from fostering cooperation and facilitating knowledge sharing, the organization “has really put integrated photonics on the map. Photondelta has provided us with funding directly, but it has also helped us tremendously in finding funding, both from investors and through collaborative research projects.”
Shock
The chip – or, more aptly: system-on-chip – Effect Photonics’ Silicon Valley customer was looking for was a 16-channel transceiver capable of dense wavelength-division multiplexing. DWDM allows data from incoming signals to be separated and encoded on different wavelengths of light, which are subsequently sent onward through a single fiber-optic cable. At the receiving end, the colors are disentangled and sent to their final destination: the customers of internet service providers. In essence, DWDM dramatically increases the amount of data that can be sent through a fiber-optic cable or network. Or, conversely, it saves a lot of fiber-optic cables.
So, even though the initial customer didn’t go through with it, Effect Photonics was still convinced that its chip made for a great business proposition. “It was clear to us that integrated optics has a lot to offer in fiber-optic networking. The equivalent system composed of discrete components
Copyright Effect Photonics
would be prohibitively expensive. So, after the initial shock of the project getting canceled, we decided to pitch our technology to other networking companies, like Huawei, Nokia and Ericsson.”
It worked: leveraging the interest of networking companies, Effect Photonics closed a new investment round in 2014 to develop a DWDM optical transceiver, this time geared towards less cost-sensitive business applications, such as corporate offices and cellular towers. “The chip would essentially be the same, except we needed only 10 channels, but more bandwidth per channel.”
After another couple of years of development, however, it dawned on Effect Photonics that there was a fundamental problem with their transceiver: even if they would get it market-ready, they probably wouldn’t be able to sell any. “You need transceivers at both ends of the connection. We had been focusing on the transceiver that sends out multiple wavelengths, but at the other end, you need transceivers too, to send a signal
back.” Network operators wouldn’t even consider switching to DWDM before these single-channel (or: single-wavelength) transceivers were available at an acceptable price level. And they weren’t.
Flexible and scalable
This commercial bottleneck may have actually been a blessing in disguise for Effect Photonics. A single-channel transceiver was basically a much simpler version of what the company had been working on all these years. Developing one would be relatively easy, manufacturing it would be less complex, and even the advanced packaging – for which the company had developed a solution in-house at a facility set up in Brixham, in the southwest of England – would retain its advantages.
“We realized we had a great proposition here because we had tunable lasers. In the multi-channel transceiver, we had been taking advantage of that tunability, but only to keep the wavelength from drifting in response to, for example, temperature changes. For the generation of the light itself, it was more cost-effective to have a separate laser for every wavelength. On the other hand, a single-channel transceiver that can be tuned to a specific wavelength would be a major boon for network operators because they don’t like to keep a different model in stock for every wavelength.”
Ironically, the single-channel transceiver, at the right price level, would even make the multi-channel one unnecessary. “You can just as easily use multiple singlechannel transceivers. This has a major advantage, actually: you take as many as you need, while in a multi-channel, the number of channels is fixed. It’s a much more flexible and scalable way to move towards DWDM networking.”
Make its mark
From 2016 onward, Effect Photonics focused on the single-channel transceiver. It didn’t take long for the company
Copyright Effect Photonics
to complete a prototype that met all specifications. Next up was the grueling process of meeting the demands of stability, reliability, reproducibility and manufacturing yield.
“We really had to go through a learning curve getting our product market-ready. Obtaining your first design that meets the specs is wonderful but not nearly good enough to start selling anything. We had to do a lot of optimization – the optimal design not being the one with the best performance, but with the highest yield and acceptable performance.”
“One standard requirement we had to meet, for example, was keeping our transceiver working for a thousand hours at 85 degrees Celsius and 85 percent humidity. That’s like hanging it just above the surface of a pot of boiling water! Traditionally, optical components have very sturdy packaging to withstand such conditions, using materials like kevlar. We had something entirely new and for cost reasons didn’t
want to go that way. So we had to find our own solutions – and we did.”
Effect Photonics launched its first product this year, a 10 Gb/s DWDM tunable optical transceiver module. It’s 10-20 percent more expensive than a fixed-wavelength transceiver, which is impressive in itself, as tunable is typically twice as expensive as fixed. Total cost of ownership is where Effect Photonics’ product really shines, however. “We have an autotuning feature, in which the module scans the network for what channel to use. One component, not 40 different model numbers to keep in stock, no engineer required to program it at installation: it’s plug-and-play and hot-pluggable.” 10 Gb/s may not sound like much when transceivers of 400 or 600 Gb/s are being considered for some applications. But there are plenty of applications for which 10 Gb/s is still the best match, assures Docter: his company is already working closely with several companies to get the technology on the road. The transceivers are already in field trials.
Effect Photonics will move on to higher bandwidths, of course. “No one develops a chip technology for a single product. We’re now in possession of a technology platform that can relatively easily be expanded upon. Possibly, in other markets than telecom, but right now, we don’t want to distract ourselves.” A 25 Gb/s module is now being manufactured and slated for launch later this year – the 5G community has shown particular interest in this one. A 100 Gb/s version is in development as well and eventually, Effect Photonics will move into the 400-600 Gb/s realm. “At the right volumes, we think that we’ll be able to offer these up to four times cheaper than current solutions.”
Thus, Effect Photonics is finally ready to make its mark in the world. Starting with little more than an inkling of untapped potential, it’s taken the startup the better part of a decade to settle on a winning product, and another couple of years to get it market-ready. Now it’s time to reap the rewards.
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Bram Nauta is a professor of IC design at the University of Twente.
Turning the knobs
Ifind it incredible how politicians and administrators lack even basic technical and mathematical insights. They use the term “exponential growth” in relation to the virus outbreak, but probably have no clue what it means. For them, it probably means: so much growth, I may not get re-elected. But even a student interviewed on a street in Delft commented on national TV: “I’m a technical student, so I know what exponential growth means: if you plot something in a logarithmic X-axis and logarithmic Y-axis and you get a straight line, then it’s exponential!” The journalist, who was even more unaware of what exponential growth is, nodded with interest. “Hmm, aha, that makes sense.”
As engineers, we of course understand exponential growth. It’s a property of even a very basic linear first-order system. First-year undergrad stuff. Real-world systems, including our virus outbreak, are more complex than just first order: the system has feedback in the form of measures taken to suppress/release the virus and the system also has significant latency, which consists of, for example, the incubation time.
We all know that control systems with latency are hard to make stable. Just imagine standing under your shower and turning the knobs to tune the water temperature. If the shower hose was 100 meters long, you’d have to be extremely careful.
But the failures we see in managing this crisis would occur even if the corona system wasn’t as complex as it is. Even if the virus wasn’t spreading exponentially, the measures taken would still fail. Let’s have a look.
The first example illustrates both a total denial of exponential growth and a lack of elementary-school mathematics skills. At the start of the epidemic, the focus was on ‘herd immunity.’ The assumption was that when a large majority of the people would have caught the virus, society as a whole would be protected. With a very optimistic fraction of only 0.5
percent (1 in 200) of the infected getting really sick and ending up at the intensive care, we only needed to take care that our intensive care capacity of 2,000 beds wouldn’t be exceeded.
Time for a simple calculation. Assume each victim stays about 20 days in intensive care, so there’s a maximum influx of 2,000 / 20 = 100 people per day. With the aforementioned 0.5 percent assumption, this means that 200 x 100 = 20,000 infections per day is the maximum we can handle. Note that this is a flat rate: no growth allowed at all. If we would be able to do this, it would take 17,000,000 / 20,000 = 850 days to have all 17 million inhabitants infected in a controlled way. That’s 2.3 years.
Another simple calculation is the estimation of the number of tests we need per day. More testing means less latency in the control system, so this is crucial. At the moment of writing, the official target was 30,000 tests per day. This may sound like a lot, but it’s orders of magnitude away from what we need. If we want to test each inhabitant of the Netherlands, then with 30,000 per day, that would take 17,000,000 / 30,000 = 567 days. That means: every inhabitant can be tested only once per 1.5 years. Talk about latency!
So, I’m afraid we’re stuck with this virus for a while.
Basic mathematical and technological insight appears to be important in managing these difficult times. It would be good if those who turn the knobs of our society would possess these insights.
The good thing is that there are people who understand complex control systems and managing exponential growth. That’s us! We created computers, communication means, the internet, smartphones, tablets, webcams and much more to come. Almost everything can be done online now. Imagine this virus had come 30 years earlier, how would we have survived? Without the continuous exponential growth via Moore’s law, we’d be in panic sending faxes to each other!
Mislukken is geen optie!
In het dagelijks leven ben je afhankelijk van een heleboel verschillende producten. De auto waarin je rijdt, het vliegtuig waarmee je vliegt, of de ECG-apparatuur waarmee de activiteit van je hart wordt gemeten. Je verwacht dat alles goed functioneert – simpelweg omdat het moet.
In alle elektronische producten zit een printplaat. Op het eerste gezicht lijken die allemaal op elkaar. Er zit echter een wereld van verschil tussen een normale printplaat en een High Reliability PCB. Het komt allemaal aan op de details, de nauwkeurigheid. Het begint met het ontwerp, de juiste specificaties en het kiezen van de juiste productiepartner. Het omvat ook de logistiek, levernauwkeurigheid en het zoveel mogelijk verduurzamen van het gehele proces.
High Reliability PCBs. Omdat mislukken geen optie is!
Joachim Burghartz is the director of the Institut für Mikroelektronik Stuttgart (IMS Chips) and the former director of Dimes at Delft University of Technology.
Back in school
I’m back in school thanks to corona. I’m attending live lectures in biology, medicine, pharmacy, statistics, law, psychology, social sciences, public media, material sciences and more. Why? Because our freedom is currently severely impacted by precautionary measures imposed by our political leadership. Those measures are based on figures and numbers. As an engineer, I feel obligated to verify those. I looked at some of those figures in Germany. They raised questions, which I’d like to share with the readers of Bits&Chips.
Let’s take a look at the corona app. After its release in June, about 17.5 million Germans downloaded it, or 20 percent of the German population, when not considering multiple downloads. Beware, these are just downloads; it’s not actual usage. While the German RobertKoch-Institute (RKI) doesn’t publish about that, we know from the similar Swisscovid app that only about 60 percent of the downloads is being used. This lowers the number of likely corona app users in Germany to 12 percent.
According to the Oxford Study, app usage should be at least 15 percent to have any noticeable effect. But even at 20 percent, the reproduction factor R could only be lowered by 0.08, which is within noise level. Is the low usage a matter of lack in public spirit and discipline? No, it’s not. Only 60 percent of the Germans has a smartphone capable of running the app. Most people above age 65 don’t own a smartphone. Why did our political leaders not consider this before pouring millions into the corona app? Weren’t the seniors the ones we wanted to protect from that virus?
I also learned that the corona PCR test results, which are used to back current political decisions, may not be reliable. One problem is that the test isn’t free of error. Even under lab conditions, sensitivity (ie the percentage of infected people correctly identified as such) ranges between 97.7 and 98.8 percent and test selectivity (ie the percentage of healthy correctly identified as such) is about
98.6 percent. In real life, the effective sensitivity is 70 percent and selectivity is 95 percent, says Dagmar Lühmann from UKE in Hamburg.
At low prevalence of infected persons among the population, this creates issues. The risk threshold for precautionary measures in Germany is 50 within 100,000. With a sensitivity of 70 percent, only 35 of the 50 infected people will be tested positive, while for 15 of them, the test will give a false negative. Those 15 actually infected ones would feel secure and be a risk for others to get infected. With the selectivity of 95 percent, 4,997 of the 99,950 non-infected people will falsely be tested positive and be quarantined for no reason.
The figure of merit of the PCR test (essentially, expressing the usefulness of the test) is the ratio of the 35 predicted cases out of the pool of 50 actually infected ones to the 5,032 total predictions of positives. For real-life conditions, that figure is as low as 0.7 percent, and even under lab conditions, it only improves to 4.7 percent, while obviously 100 percent is the target.
This relates to the low prevalence of 50 out of 100,000. Hendrik Streeck, a virologist in Bonn, the initiator of the Heinsberg Study, already pointed this out in April. The high prevalence of 15.5 percent in the Heinsberg region close to the province of Limburg pushed the PCR figure of merit to 94.7 percent.
My conclusion is that the current intense testing of people returning home from vacation, though without any symptoms, not only doesn’t make any sense but even leads to wrong and misleading conclusions. The focus must be on the ill and hospitalized people, says Streeck.
So, my appeal to you as my colleagues, who are used to deal with numbers and facts in your daily engineering work, is to continuously look at those corona figures and explain them to your relatives, friends and neighbours, so that we all can participate in a democratic debate, always leaving room for different opinions, but never for misleading numbers and figures.
