December 19, 2019
The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI participates in the new H2020 5GPPP project TERAWAY that was officially launched in November 2019. The goal of the project is to apply photonic technology for ultra-broadband and ultra-wideband operation of backhaul and fronthaul links in systems with SDN management of network and radio resources. In December, the twelve project partners from six European countries met for a two-day kick-off meeting at the Fraunhofer HHI in Berlin to analyze TERAWAY’s workplan in depth, specify the role of each partner in the project’s deployment and define the next actions.
TERAWAY aims to develop a disruptive generation of Terahertz (THz) transceivers for high-capacity BH and FH links in 5G networks. Leveraging optical concepts and photonic integration techniques, TERAWAY will develop a common technology base for the generation, emission and detection of wireless signals with selectable symbol rate and bandwidth up to 25.92 GHz within an ultra-wide range of carrier frequencies covering the W-band, D-band and THz band. For the first time, TERAWAY will provide in this way the possibility to organize the spectral resources of a network within these bands into a common pool of radio resources that can be flexibly coordinated and used. The use of photonics will enable the development of multi-channel transceivers with amplification of the wireless signals in the optical domain and with multi-beam optical beamforming in order to have a radical increase in the directivity of each wireless beam. In parallel, the project will develop a new software defined networking (SDN) controller and an extended control hierarchy that will perform the management of the network and the radio resources in a homogeneous way. At the end of this development, TERAWAY will make available a set of ground breaking transceiver modules that will be evaluated at the 5G demo site of AALTO and NOKIA in Finland, under an application scenario of communication and surveillance coverage of outdoor mega-events using moving nodes in the form of heavy-duty drones.
Within TERAWAY, three different research groups from Fraunhofer HHI’s Photonic Components Department, namely the Hybrid PICs Group, the Photonic InP Foundry Group and the Terahertz Sensors and Systems Group will develop polymer-based hybrid tunable laser arrays and passive wave guiding networks for the Tx and Rx modules, high speed optical phase modulator arrays for data modulation and for the generation of optical frequency combs, as well as InP-based emitter and I/Q receiver arrays for mmW/THz radiation.
TERAWAY is a H2020 5GPPP Phase III project funded by the European Union. The project consortium consist besides Fraunhofer HHI (DE) of Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (DE), Leibniz-Institut fuer Hoechstfrequenztechnik (DE), Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo (ES), Intracom S.A. Telecom Solutions (GR), SIAE Microelettronica S.p.A. (IT), LioniX International BV (NL), Optagon hotonics (GR), PHIX Photonics Assembly (NL), Cumucore OY (FIN), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (ES), Aalto University (FIN). The Institute of Communications & Computer Systems of the National Technical University of Athens (GR) coordinates the action.