iPronics technology showcase at Vodafone Stand at the Mobile World Congress – photonics disrupting 5G applications

New generation of 5G/6G Radio Access Networks (RAN) will require technologies able to reduce power consumption, increase speed and reduce latency. Vodafone showcases how photonics can replace some of the electronic hardware in Radio Units (RUs), eliminating optical-electrical conversions and moving processing to the optical domain scaling-down infrastructure and enabling the implementation of AI-defined energy saving strategies.

Photonics technologies have been key in the most important telecommunication revolutions, such as the internet boom enabled when signals were sent through submarine cables at the speed of light crossing entire oceans. Since then, photonics has been conquering the different telecommunications infrastructures, high-speed transceivers for datacenters and more recently playing an important role in communicating between chips in new AI clusters. Beyond this Photonics is now enabling high-speed communications in intra-datacenter and 5G/6G mmwave applications.

At Mobile World Congress 2024, Vodafone Intelligent Solutions _VOIS (Hall 3, Stand 3E11) will present the concept of a photonic RU, showing for the first time the potential of this breakthrough to enable beam-forming in the photonic/analog domain for high-speed frequencies, including processing usually performed in the digital transceiver unit such as signal pre-distortion and correction of other impairments. This development has been possible due to recent disruption in photonic integration, so-called software-defined photonics, developed by iPronics Programmable Photonics, a pioneering European DeepTech startup in partnership with Vodafone. iPronics provides its technology based on programmable photonic circuits, overcoming the limitations of static photonic circuits in terms of fabrication robustness with on-the-fly programmability to optimize network requirements, a new frontier in next generation base stationss.