GigOptix, Inc. has announced its participation in the PANTHER (Passive and Electro-optic Polymer Photonics and InP Electronic Integration for Multi-Flow Terabit Transceivers at Edge SDN Switches and Data-Center) research project, funded in part by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) of the European Commission (EC).

PANTHER aims to develop programmable transceivers with Terabit capacity for next generation optical networks. The project will combine electro-optic with passive polymers for ultrahigh speed modulation and enhanced on chip-functionality. It will also integrate the polymer platform with InP gain chips and InP photodiode arrays. For the driving electronics it will use InP-DHBT technology. Finally, PANTHER will use 3D integration techniques to package these components in system-in-package transceivers, capable of 64 Gbaud operations with formats up to DP-64-QAM and flexibility in handling multiple optical flows on-chip.

Dr. Raluca Dinu, VP and GM High Speed Communications products at GigOptix stated, "We are very excited to be part of the PANTHER research project and are working to contribute to its success. We believe that a successful PANTHER program will represent a meaningful contribution to technology development in the field of telecommunications, and is in line with GigOptix product development roadmaps addressing the ever growing demand for ultrahigh capacity coherent transmission systems."

The total budget of the project is EUR 5,355,744, with EUR 3,369,926 coming from the European Commission. The project started officially on January 1, 2014 and will run for three years. The consortium, headed by the National Technical University of Athens (GR), comprises GigOptix’ wholly-owned Swiss subsidiary GigOptix-Helix AG (CH), III-V Lab (FR), the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute (GE), Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France (FR), Linkra S.R.L. (IT), the Danmarks Teknisske Universitet (DK) and Telecom Italia S.p.A (IT).

GigOptix ultrahigh speed Thin-Film-Polymer-on-Silicon (TFPS) Mach-Zehnder Modulator (MZM) and 100Gbps Coherent Linear MZM driver, which are the technology parts that contributed to the PANTHER project, will be demonstrated at Booth #1531 at the OFC/NFOEC Conference in San Francisco, CA from Mar. 11-13, 2014.