This project is the second in the series of EC-financed parts of the Graphene Flagship. The Graphene Flagship is a 10 year research and innovation endeavour with a total project cost of 1,000,000,000 euros, funded jointly by the European Commission and member states and associated countries. The first part of the Flagship was a 30-month Collaborative Project, Coordination and Support Action (CP-CSA) under the 7th framework program (2013-2016), while this and the following parts are implemented as Core Projects under the Horizon 2020 framework. The mission of the Graphene Flagship is to take graphene and related layered materials from a state of raw potential to a point where they can revolutionise multiple industries. This will bring a new dimension to future technology – a faster, thinner, stronger, flexible, and broadband revolution. Our program will put Europe firmly at the heart of the process, with a manifold return on the EU investment, both in terms of technological innovation and economic growth. To realise this vision, we have brought together a larger European consortium with about 150 partners in 23 countries. The partners represent academia, research institutes and industries, which work closely together in 15 technical work packages and five supporting work packages covering the entire value chain from materials to components and systems. As time progresses, the centre of gravity of the Flagship moves towards applications, which is reflected in the increasing importance of the higher - system - levels of the value chain. In this first core project the main focus is on components and initial system level tasks. The first core project is divided into 4 divisions, which in turn comprise 3 to 5 work packages on related topics. A fifth, external division acts as a link to the parts of the Flagship that are funded by the member states and associated countries, or by other funding sources. This creates a collaborative framework for the entire Flagship.

This proposal describes the third stage of the EC-funded part of the Graphene Flagship. It builds upon the results achieved in the ramp-up phase (2013 - 2016) and the first core project (2016 - 2018), and covers the period April 2018 - March 2020. The progress of the flagship follows the general plans set out in the Framework Partnership Agreement, and the second core project represents an additional step towards higher technology and manufacturing readiness levels. The Flagship is built upon the concept of value chains, one of which is along the axis of materials-components-systems; the ramp-up phase placed substantial resources on the development of materials production technologies, the first core project moved to emphasise components, and the second core project will move further towards integrating components in larger systems. This evolution is manifested, e.g., in the introduction of six market-motivated spearhead projects during the Core 2 project.

Optical communications are becoming always more relevant because of the continuous growth of the requiested bandwidth. In the last decade we assisted a continuous growing of transport and metro netwotks, presently the bottleneck is in the processing of the huge amount of data constituted by the growing number of users, the capacity of the content that is exchanged and the convergence of Telecom and Datacom. This accumulation of data are elaborated and redirected within data centers with a continuous growing of traffic congestion. The continuous growth of traffic require therefore a roadmap of bandwidth density growth that necessarily has to be scalable on the timeframe of several years. To this point photonics plays a crucial role that is always more pervasive. However a major limiting factor is also arising from the energy cost and latency accumulated by the need of aggregation to route signals. To limitate this effect is necessary to make possible data exchange and processing without or with limited aggregation. Teraboard project consists in developing a full intra data center photonic platform for intraboard, intrarack and intra data center optical communications. The Teraboard interconnection platform will be based on ultra-high density and scalable bandwidth optical interconnectivity with low insertion loss and a target of lowest energy cost per channel of 2.5pJ/bit and a manufacturing cost of 0.1$/Gb/s in volumes. These target values are 10x reduction respect to commercial state of the art. Teraboard demonstrates: 1) passive, scalable, 3D inter processor interconnection layer, 2) novel WDM optical connector to plug the fiber ribbons directly onto the transceiver chip, 3) intraboard transceiver bank with high density bandwidth of 7Tb/s/cm2. Single wavelength laser arrays will be directly integrated on the silicon photonics transceiver circuits, 4) and edge single and four wavelength transceiver interface with bandwidth density of 50 and 7Tb/s/cm2 respectively.

Nowadays there is a shared vision among industry, operators and academy that beyond 5G wireless networks will have to provide wideband wireless access and ubiquitous computing anywhere and at any time. The human life of the majority of the EU citizen will be surrounded by intelligent wireless sensors, which will bring radical changes to the way we live and do things. Supporting this scenario is a challenge for network operators and wireless network infrastructures and it will demand a tremendous performance improvement of medium range wireless infrastructure. This challenge needs to be addressed by a convergence of advanced semiconductor nanotechnology and a robust wireless infrastructure meshed network with seamless fiber performances. The DREAM project, through the exploitation of the radio spectrum in D-band (130-174.8 GHz) with beam steering functionality, will enable wireless links with data rate exceeding current V-band and E-band wireless backhaul solutions by at least a factor of 10 and thus, it will bring wireless systems to the speed of optical systems. The DREAM project vision and objectives rely on a power efficient and silicon based BiCMOS transceiver analog front end, operating in D-band and enabling cost efficient deployment of meshed networks with seamless fiber performance. A beam steering integrated antenna array using an intelligent low-cost packaging technology prototype will be developed for the implementation of the beyond 5G network proof of concept in a realistic environment. The DREAM consortium has a well-balanced and complementary known-how in the relevant areas for designing and demonstrating the feasibility of a small cell cellular network architecture based on meshed D-band backhaul links. DREAM will therefore secure Europe’s industrial leadership and pave the way towards the beyond 5G telecommunications networks.

METRO-HAUL is a project proposal addressing the Horizon 2020 ICT-07 5G PPP call; it is an RIA, focusing on strand 2 (high capacity elastic – optical networks) and strand 3 (software networks). The central topic is cost-efficient optical metro networks for 5G backhaul. The aim of this project is to design and build a smart, but cost-effective, optical metro infrastructure able to support traffic originating from heterogeneous 5G access networks, addressing the anticipated capacity increase and its specific characteristics such as mobility, low latency, and high bandwidth. This infrastructure will be able to also support a wide variety of 5G applications with special emphasis on services from various industries vertical to the ICT. This will be achieved by architecting new access-facing and core-facing nodes, complete with storage and compute facilities, interconnected by novel, spectrally efficient, and adaptive optical transmission networks. Advanced concepts, such as hardware disaggregation and virtualisation, will assist in hitting challenging cost targets whilst enabling automation and programmability – all supported by a purpose-designed SDN-based control plane which will interface with client applications, intelligently catering for the wide range of 5G KPIs. METRO-HAUL will coordinate the disparate elements of transmission, switching, networking, compute, and storage, orchestrating dynamic solutions for multiple 5G applications. METRO-HAUL will carry out Proof of Concept demonstrations of its networking solution involving the interconnection of metro node prototypes, the use of the project's transmission technologies, and the associated control plane and orchestration software. The final project demonstrations will also involve the demonstration of actual 5G and vertical services across the METRO-HAUL test-bed. Additionally, the project will actively participate in the relevant standardization bodies, promoting METRO-HAUL solutions to the wider community.