Adaptive and High-Spectral Efficiency Communications by Optical Arbitrary Waveform Generation and Measurements

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

The project will investigate a new ultra-high capacity communication technology that can scale beyond terabit per second capacity, withstand physical layer impairments, and flexibly support diverse data flows. The project combines new and scalable optical arbitrary waveform generation techniques together with microwave communications, signal processing, and coding techniques. The resulting terascale system effectively accommodates high and low data flow traffic and mitigates physical layer impairments. The project will also investigate CMOS-compatible silicon based optical integration, and will pursue future integration of electronic and photonic functions to realize more compact and agile functions on a chip scale system. The intellectual merit of this research is in the theoretical and experimental investigations of hardware and software, and in studying photonic and electronic solutions for future terascale communication systems with resiliency, flexibility, and scalability. Furthermore, the project will also pursue significant enhancement in signal processing capability by combining best opportunities in both optics and electronics. The results of this project will provide a new insight into optical-electronic communication technologies, hardware-software codesign, silicon photonic integrated circuits, and future prospects for resulting communication, computing, and information technology of the future. The broader impacts of this research are as follows: (1) transforming the way of design, implementation, and operation of healthcare, data center networking, and cloud computing, (2) making available compact communication tools fabricated by CMOS foundry to provide rapid and widespread benefits to the society, (3) bringing new communication theory and algorithm crosscutting optics, electronics, and computing framework, (4) developing new courses to disseminate the up-to-date knowledge on communications and optoelectronics, (5) introducing opportunity for underrepresented and high-school students to be involved in state-of-the-art technology research and education, and (6) stimulating new opportunities towards realizing intelligent terascale communication systems.