The best of all worlds

Fraunhofer HHI’s hybrid integration technology  PolyBoard combines polymer based PICs with InP platforms and enables complex photonic integrated circuits such as all-waveguide integrated THz receiver PIC for wireless communication and self-calibrated laser source for Telecom/Datacom, sensing and spectroscopy. The THz receiver PIC utilizes tunable lasers, modulator, and isolator to achieve on-chip injection locking and feeds the THz signal into the waveguide integrated photoconductive antenna. The self-calibrated laser source utilizes the micro-optical bench feature on PolyBoard which allows the precise wavelength read-out through thin film filters, etalons and photodiodes. Both complex PICs are founded through EU projects TERAWAY and TERAmeasure accordingly.

A portable PIC evaluation setup for fast and convenient prototype development

PIConnect , Fraunhofer HHI’s PIC evaluation setup, integrates 4 laser drivers, 1 TEC, and 8 current and 8 voltage sources. The PIC is mounted and connected on the integrated PIConnect submount. The system enables parallel operation of multiple building blocks and replaces 21 discrete controllers.

A compact RF PIC assembly for fast and convenient prototype development up to 40 GHz

RFconnect, Fraunhofer HHI’s new fiber coupled RF PIC assembly, states a compatible expansion of the already established DC multisource PIConnect. The thermally controllable assembly with 8 RF & optical ports and 42 DC ports facilitates the connection of RF measurement equipment.

C- & O-Band High-Speed Modulator

InP Mach-Zehnder Modulator with ultra-high bandwidth for C- & O-Band applications.

Components for 1Tb/s Transmission and Microwave Photonics

Fraunhofer HHI provides single and balanced photodetector modules with a bandwidth up to 145 GHz operating from the O- to the L-band. The intended application for the modules is test and measurement. For the application of microwave photonics dedicated high-power photodetector modules are presented.

Fraunhofer HHI provides high speed EMLs with a bandwidth up to 60GHz and operation temperature between 20 and 85°C. A new development are 4-channel LAN-WDM O-band 4 x 200Gb/s PAM4 EML arrays. Respective results will be presented at OFC paper M2D.5.

Fraunhofer HHI and ID Photonics introducing the next generation Terabit Class IQ Reference Transmitter

The latest Test & Measurement Equipment launched by Fraunhofer HHI and ID Photonics is the DP-IQ Reference Transmitter . It is a fully integrated optical frontend instrument that converts differential electrical RF signals into various optical modulation formats (e.g. QPSK and m-QAM) using a high fidelity tuneable laser source followed by a high-bandwidth dual-polarization IQ Mach Zehnder modulator. It is an ideal match to convert signals generated by an Arbitrary Waveform Generator (AWG) into the optical domain. At a bandwidth of up to 60 GHz, this device provides unparalleled signal fidelity for research in next generation multi-level transmission formats even at high symbol rates beyond 100 GBaud/s in the Terabit/s single carrier regime. It is suitable as reference transmitter for receiver characterization or reference transmitter setups.

Fraunhofer HHI presents a LiDAR system  based on coherent detection. This system enables long-range operation and potentially a small form factor. It is based on the modulation of an eye-safe laser at a wavelength of 1550 nm which scans the scene using novel MEMS mirrors.

Machine Learning as a Service

The ML Pipeline  facilitates the streaming of telemetry data from network elements to a data lake, where it can be accessed by multiple telemetry data consumers. This allows network applications to utilize telemetry data in nearly real-time. The pipeline offers an ML inference host, through which various ML-assisted network functions can consume telemetry data.

Optical Network Health Monitoring

The Visual Analytics Dashboard  provides a unique set of network data visualizations to help vendors and operators collect insights about the network operation. It targets several use-cases of relevance to network automation; including network health monitoring, visualized light path provisioning, dataset quality evaluation, and ML model error interpretation.