Objectives

Development of a sub-mm² monolithic silicon QKD transmitter.

The silicon light source: compact SiGe light source created with silicon photonics for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). It emits light suitable for QKD with precise spectral shaping in the C-band and a small footprint of 5·10⁴ μm², capable of a launch power of 0.1 photons/symbol after encoding.
Compact BB84 encoder: showcase a small interferometric polarization modulator using silicon photonics, achieving 1 Gb/s state encoding in Stokes space. It’ll have a footprint of no more than 8·10⁵ μm² , making it compatible with precious real estate in chiplet approaches.
Monolithic integrated QKD transmitter for intrad-DC applications: for the first time, it will be achieved fully integrated QKD functions using silicon, ensuring secure data transmission. QISS.ME demonstrates QKD optics integrated onto IHP’s silicon platform, capable of operating at 1 Gb/s and yielding a secure-key rate of 10 kb/s, meeting high security standards even in fast-paced datacenter settings.

Simplify QKD and enable fan-in architectures with cost-shared receiver through pre-compensation of the polarization transform along the quantum channel.

QISS∙ME’s compact QKD transmitter enhances the QKD link by integrating receiver functions into Alice’s transmitter. It employs an interferometric BB84 Stokes vector encoder, enabling continuous modulation for flexible quantum state transmission. By consolidating polarization modulation and control functions using AI-based control, it simplifies the QKD receiver setup and supports point-to-multipoint architectures. This approach ensures optimal quantum channel alignment with minimal additional hardware, maintaining low error rates.

Enhance trust in the datacenter through disruptive down-scaling of QKD.

QISS∙ME aims to advance zero-trust principles in information factories by developing QKD transmitter chiplets. These chip-scale DV-QKD transmitters will seamlessly integrate with electronic ASICs, enabling trusted security at the hardware level. They’ll operate in high-temperature and EMI environments, reducing quantum optics to IC package size within network equipment. This enhances security, frees up datacenter rack space for computing and storage, and prevents signal interception.

Demonstrate the migration to a zero-trust intra-datacenter model in representative datacenter and high-performance computing (HPC) scenarios.

QISS∙ME will showcase chiplet QKD technology in two datacenter scenarios:

Intra-DC Optical Interconnects: Demonstrating East-West security within datacenters, enabling every server to contribute to security. Targeting a secure-key rate of >10 kb/s over optical links with a 2 km reach, alongside investigating co-existence with classical data channels.
HPC Datacenter Interconnects (DCI): Implementing QKD technology in a 6 km DCI link in Vienna with a 100 Gb/s capacity. The project will assess polarization pre-compensation and its suitability for telecom applications.