Data centres are increasing in size to be able to support an exponential increase in data usage which, in turn, is driving up energy consumption. In 2015, data centres consumed over 400TWh worldwide to power and cool server racks, with power consumption increasing at around 14% per year. An example data centre, NGD, based in Newport, UK, has its own primary sub-station connected to the grid and consumes 90MW of electricity (enough for 700,000 homes). Around 20% of data centre power is used to power data communications using lasers and fibre optics. Government attention is being focussed on data centre power consumption and there is a strong market need for solutions that can reduce consumption. Data centres round the world used 416 TWh of electricity costing £19billion in 2016.

At HiLight, we have developed world-leading CMOS technology solutions that reduce communication power but these are currently focussed on shorter optic fibre lengths of 100m. For large data centres, fibre lengths can be up to 2km, which require higher data rates driven by higher powered lasers.

Our innovation is to develop methods of implementing the required laser drive functionality within a CMOS process using 28nm sized transistors rather than use a 180nm Bipolar process technology that operates at higher voltages consuming more energy. This will allow us to improve data centre costs by reducing energy use and reduce the 13% of the UK's annual electricity consumption that data centres use.

This project will develop a 100Gbps CMOS chipset (4x25Gbps) that will speed up data transfer within data centres and replace existing power hungry BiPolar technology devices, reducing power usage by up to 25% while maintaining existing device functionality.

Implementing CMOS circuits operating at 25Gbps per channel and driving high power requirement lasers is extremely difficult and requires a great deal of innovation in how we obtain the required performance using low power CMOS processes. However, we have already successfully implemented CMOS solutions for 10Gbps applications, exploiting 55nm CMOS technology developed previously with support from Innovate UK. This project will build on this platform, allowing us to capture a huge global market, currently dominated by US suppliers.

Within 5 years of completing this project (2023) we expect to generate cumulative revenue and profit of £26.7m ($34.75m) and £22.7m ($29.5m) respectively, in turn creating 90 highly skilled, world-class jobs. We expect to save 4.5MWh per year per large data centre.