Guildford, UK-based Finchetto has been awarded a contract under Innovate UK's Contracts for Innovation programme to develop photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for what the company claims is the world's first fully optical passive network switch.
The project will see the company’s technology deployed in a commercial pilot programme for datacomms applications, marking an important transition from laboratory development to real-world deployment. The optical network switch supports both circuit and packet switching capabilities.
20x power reduction claimed over electronic switches
Finchetto's first-generation optical switch is designed to achieve up to a 20-fold reduction in power requirements compared to current industry-leading electronic switches. The fully optical, passive architecture eliminates the need for electronics in the data path itself, enabling ultra-low-latency networking and removing the need for optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversions.
The technology can support advanced network topologies, such as Intel's PolarFly architecture, which is designed for massively distributed compute environments.
Mark Rushworth, chief executive and co-founder of Finchetto, says: "Winning this Innovate UK Contracts for Innovation funding accelerates our mission to reinvent networking at the speed of light and bring fully optical infrastructure out of the lab and into the real world.”
Addressing data centre energy consumption
This development directly addresses the soaring energy consumption in data centres and hyperscale facilities, which Finchetto notes currently account for more than 1.5% of global electricity use. The company positions optical switching as the only viable alternative to endlessly scaling electronic infrastructure to meet accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) workload demands.
"AI is redefining the world, but right now it's doing so at a pace the planet can't afford," said Rushworth. "Data centres are on course to become one of the largest consumers of global electricity, and simply scaling more silicon and more power isn't a viable future. Finchetto was founded to break that energy-performance trade-off."
Following completion of the pilot deployment, the project is expected to progress rapidly towards commercial development. The Innovate UK funding specifically supports further development of Finchetto's PICs ahead of the commercial trial.
