he DNRF’s Centre for Silicon Photonics for Optical Communication (SPOC) will collaborate with Aarhus University and 12 Danish companies in a new three-year Grand Solutions project called INCOM. The project is being funded with a grant of 100 million DKK from the Innovation Fund and other sources and aims to improve the infrastructure of the internet through a faster and greener solution.
Since the millennium, internet traffic has doubled and, today, accounts for approximately 10 percent of the world’s collective electricity utilities. The massive increase in data traffic means that there is a need for to develop a new technology to create an improved digital infrastructure that can handle the massive amounts of traffic better. Just as increased traffic on roads and bicycle paths creates a need for a better road network, today’s data traffic needs more space, and the traffic on the internet likewise needs to be faster and greener in the future.

In a new three-year Grand Solutions project, called INCOM, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark, including basic research center SPOC, will work with researchers from Aarhus University and 12 Danish companies. The project will create new, sustainable solutions for future generations of communication infrastructures. The project is supported with a grant of 100 million DKK, 60 million DKK of which is coming from the Innovation Fund. The collaboration also includes more than 15 associated partners, the majority coming from industry.
“The project stems from our research and the results achieved at SPOC, but it also involves other subjects reaching further than SPOC – subjects defined by our industry partners. The main idea is to pursue knowledge transfer from the universities for a selection of Danish companies in collaboration with a number of large actors abroad where the knowledge obtained, for a large part of them, has been at SPOC,” said Professor Leif Oxenløwe, who is head of center at SPOC and the man behind the project.