Here at RedKnight we are now accustomed to celebrate every new month with a success, and this November is no different, as another success has been addedd on the RedKnight scoreboard. This time we are delighted to have supported South Wales based Compound Semiconductor Centre (CSC) Ltd with a successful application to the Eureka-Eurostars programme, scooping a grant of €632,812 for the consortium, which comprises Manchester based Integrated Compound Semiconductors (ICS) Ltd and V-tech Lasers & Sensors, based in Eindhoven. This latest success brings RedKnight’s total funding secured since September 2015 to over £4.7m.The project, titled Monolithically Integrated Detector Solutions for Next Generation Comms Applications (MISCA), aims to lever semiconductor material integration to deliver disruptive, scalable component platforms, addressing demands of next generation telecommunications, data communications and optical infrastructure. The consortium will use intelligent monolithic integration of compound semiconductor materials platforms to deliver high-speed detector solutions with co-optimised RF and optical performance.
With Global IP traffic set to increase 3-fold over the next 5 years, having already increased 127-fold from 2005, an enormous market for fibre optic communications components has been created. The EU has built a significant proportion of GDP on digital activities, however the data centre infrastructure required to deliver such services must embrace step changes in data rate improvements to keep pace with demand. This requires reliable, mass produced, high quality optical transceivers to achieve this aim.
In this regard, MISCA will provide a step change in the degree of materials integration used in the volume manufacturing process for PIN (Positive, Intrinsic, Negative) diode and Avalanche Photo-diode (APD) device-based receivers – a major acceleration in the commercialisation of the innovative technology. This integration approach will deliver increased chip-scale specification to unlock packaging simplification and reduced operating power requirements, which has added benefits for environmentally friendly manufacturing.
Mr Wyn Meredith, Director at CSC, said of the successful application “The support from Redknight took away all the effort and angst of understanding the bid requirements and allowed us to concentrate on building the business case for the project. I was impressed at the rate at which the RedKnight team got to grips with the complexities of the technical aspects of the bid, and the added value in their understanding of the needs of the assessment process”