oDAC: Boosting data centre speeds with less power
Wednesday, April 2, 2025 at 3:04PM Academics have developed an optical digital-to-analogue converter (oDAC) that promises to rethink how high-speed optical transmission is done.
Professor Ioannis Tomkos
Conceived under the European Commission-funded Flex-Scale project for 6G front-haul, the oDAC also promises terabit links inside the data centre.
The oDAC is expected to deliver a 40 per cent power savings for a 1.6 terabit optical transmitter, which is the ‘send’ path of an optical module.
“It might not be not 50 or 60 per cent, but in this field, even a 25 per cent power saving turns heads,” says Ioannis Tomkos, a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Patras, Greece, one of the researchers leading the work.
The first proof-of-concept oDAC photonic integrated circuit (PIC) has sent 250 gigabits per second (Gbps) over a single wavelength as part of the European Proteus programme.
