A EU-funded project highlighted that the development of components for new-generation high-speed broadband core networks can work well for the future of nanotechnologies. The BOOM project that kicked off in 2008, was set up to respond to the increasing demand for bandwidth-hungry Internet applications.

The BOOM ('Terabit-on-chip: micro and nano-scale silicon photonic integrated components and sub-systems enabling Tb/s-capacity, scalable and fully integrated photonic routers') project, funded in part with €3 million from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme's (FP7), has developed compact, cost-effective and power-efficient components that enable photonic terabyte per second (Tb/s)-capacity systems for current and new-generation high-speed broadband core networks, thanks to the research advance on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) photonic integration technology.

This project had as main goal the development of a photonic routing platform relying on hybrid SOI photonic integrated circuits (ICs) to implement all the routing functionalities: label detection, control signal generation, wavelength conversion and wavelength routing.

On this way, the team of researchers perceived problems with the existing available capacity and performance of optical core networks. Power efficiency, physical size and equipment cost are key issues in these networks and they are increasingly difficult to keep within acceptable limits, particularly when electronic carrier routing systems consume and expend large amounts of electrical power and heat respectively. Therefore, by bringing photonics technologies deeper within these routers, their performance can be improved and power consumption can be decreased.