Astrape networks: Greening the data center

The photonics startup has won €1.6 million to supercharge data center efficiency.

In a move that could slash the energy consumed by data centers while overcoming bandwidth bottlenecks, Netherlands-based Astrape Networks has won €1.6 million in pre-seed funding to scale up its integrated photonics switching technology. Principals at the company, which emerged from deep-tech startup accelerator HighTechXL last year, are determined to get their nanosecond optical switching and control system out of the lab and into the industry as soon as they can.

“Our chief architect, Nicola Calabretta, has been working on fast optical switches for more than 10 years and has built several prototypes,” CEO Francesco Pessolano said. “We now see that data centers are facing many problems … so we want to show that our technology is viable and keeps its performance and power-saving promises in an industrial setting.”

Astrape hopes to “have a product in around five years’ time,” Pessolano added.

Gathering speed

As traffic volumes inside data centers have soared, industry players have turned to multi-tier electrical switching architectures to cope, trading off inefficient and power-hungry operations for speed. But as bandwidth bottlenecks and latency continue to throttle datacom, optical switching is garnering favor. Optical switches support higher bandwidths than electrical switches and do not require power-consuming electrical-optical and optical-electrical conversions, reducing the number of transceivers needed in a network.

Microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based switches have gained the most traction and have already reached some data centers, but relatively slow switching times, topping out at tens of milliseconds, have stymied adoption. Alternative optical technologies, including semiconductor optical amplifiers integrated with arrayed waveguides, promise nanosecond switching times. This is what Astrape Networks is set to serve up.

Calabretta developed the approach behind Astrape’s nanosecond optical switching and control system at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he is a professor associated with the Electro-Optical Communication group at the Center for Integrated Photonics. The technology comprises an indium phosphide switch with optical amplifier wavelength selectors and an arrayed waveguide grating router, controlled by an FPGA switch scheduler. It reportedly can reach a switching speed of 3.7 ns. Such blistering speeds could open the door to more efficient and reconfigurable optical data center networks in which bandwidth could be dynamically allocated according to demand.

Astrape is gearing up to demonstrate its system in March at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) in San Diego. The plan is to operate the optical switching system across a few servers to demonstrate industry viability.

“It’s been a surprise to see so much interest,” Pessolano said. “I hope people at OFC will watch our demo and say, ‘This is actually possible’—and maybe a larger company will want to scale up the technology with us.”