https://cdn.specpick.com/images/photonics/rockly_fundng_wall.jpg712370

Rockley Photonics Limited, over the next five years is going to match government funding from the EPSRC, and form a ‘Prosperity Partnership’ with the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC). An official announcement about this partnership, and additional projects involving 10 universities and businesses operating in key areas of innovation was made on 13th July 2017 by Jo Johnson, Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation at a special event at BT’s HQ, London.

The total funding of around £4.8 million will be used to support research into how silicon photonics technology can be used to improve data centre communication networks and support a new integrated photonics platform for broader mass market applications.

Researchs in the area is progressing quickly, and in the very near future, this game-changing, disruptive technology will soon have a huge impact on the future architecture design of large data centres; improve the power and compute capacity of new consumer devices and provide robust sensing solutions in a variety of industry sectors, such autonomous vehicles and biomedical. All this at dramatically lower cost and with considerably less power requirements.

University of Southampton’s expertise and facilities offer a unique environment for silicon photonics research and innovation. The grants promise to create a series of exciting avenues of research leading to industrial implementation. It's a wonderful new example of how, in partnership, their collective capabilities can be harnessed and economy strengthened and once again the importance of ongoing investment in the higher education research base underscored.

The UK can make a huge contribution to the development of silicon photonics and Rockley Photonics’ interest in this area comes from a long and deep understanding of this technology and emerging applications. The world’s increasing aptitude for generating astronomic volumes of IP traffic is taking its toll. Data centres are currently consuming about three percent of the global electricity supply – 416.2 terawatt hours last year. That is more than the total consumption of many individual European countries including the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Poland and the United Kingdom.

Some of the world’s key challenges are handling and manipulating the enormous amounts of data associated with the modern world, as well as the energy implications of doing so. Silicon photonics is seen as one of the key technologies to solve some of these key challenges, particularly in the deployment of energy efficient solutions for large data centres, as well as applications in high performance computing.