Optical Fiber Communications
This research is situated in the physical layer of high-speed fibre-optic communication networks with a need for faster and more efficient co-integrated transceivers with small footprints. Our work in this context extends from custom electronic and photonic chip design, transceiver architecture design, real-time signal generation/processing (in the digital, analog or optical domain), and explore novel device and co-integration technologies to overcome limitations in today’s optical communications architectures.
- Electronic IC design of the key high-speed front-end and mixed-signal circuits such as modulator drivers, transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs), clock-and-data recovery (CDR) circuits, serializer-deserializer circuits, equalizer and digital-to-analog converters
- Photonic IC design of transmitter and receiver architectures for intensity modulation, coherent modulation, mmwave radio and quantum.
- Modeling, co-design, co-simulation and co-optimization of electronic and photonic circuits
- Signal generation and signal processing in the digital domain, analog domain (high-speed mux/demux, equalization) or optically (e.g. optical equalizer, DAC, PLL, ADC)
- Develop control circuits and control strategies for complex PICs (e.g. ring locking, balancing, sense circuits and driver design for heaters and switches)
- Explore novel device technologies (e.g. InP, scaled CMOS) and new architectural approaches
- Test bed integration, system link experiments and field trials
The application domain of optical fibre communications is continuously expanding from established long-distance communications towards applications with shorter reaches and applications in more particular environments. Our ongoing work is situated in the following communications applications:
- Long-reach high-baudrate coherent communications
- Passive optical access networks (burst-mode and coherent-lite)
- Short-reach intensity-modulated datacenter communications
- Quantum key distribution and quantum random number generation
- Radiation hardened optical links for intra-satellite links (both digital and RF-over-fiber)
- Mmwave-over-fiber (5G/6G, massive mimo)
- Optical interconnects for computing
- Optical links for industry 4.0
