Photonics Strand
Photonics represents an enabling technology, which continues to enhance many market sectors such as the medical, biosciences, entertainment, avionics and telecommunications industries. For the latter, the application of photonics to this industry has highlighted the limitations of the current generation of network hardware, which is economically unsustainable due to both technical and business (supply chain) barriers. For the industry to evolve, greater component flexibility and integration is needed to develop more reliable hardware at lower cost. Tackling this problem represents many research opportunities and challenges going forward.
This strand brings together uniquely and for the first time a team of researchers to tackle major scientific challenges in innovating next generation photonic components and their integration. The strand, comprises of teams from UL, TCD and NMRC with varying disciplines (Physics, Photonics, Reliability & Test, Mechanical, Manufacturing and Aeronautical Engineering) whose mission is to deliver excellence in photonics research and development in Ireland.
The strand objectives are four fold:
- The creation of interdisciplinary research, which is at the forefront of engineering and technology focused on the development of next generation optical network hardware.
- To provide educational excellence to recruit and prepare students for future leadership and service.
- Enhance staff & faculty/interfaculty centres of excellence in both core areas of research and emerging research areas to be developed in this CTVR.
- Promote Industry & Academic research collaboration focused on advanced technology developments.
- Fast and broadly tuneable lasers components - The requirement for fast, wide bandwidth tuneable lasers using simple controls for low-cost network reconfiguration. A number of new concepts have been proposed as a means to realise widely tuneable lasers and will be pursued. These are based on the incorporation of photonic crystal elements within the laser cavity, the use of tuneable super-dispersion in multilayer structures and the extension of the slotted Fabry-Perot device with ring resonators.
- Performance monitoring components - A truly intelligent network with an automated control plane must incorporate an extensive monitoring system. The hardware components of this system must continuously monitor the optical performance and provide metrics on the sub msec time scale. Our focus in this research is to develop monitoring components (device/package) to provide dynamic information on the operation of components/packages and boards of the network.
- Integrated optical modules - Our focus will be on creating routes to manufacturing low-cost integrated photonic modules based on reusable/reconfigured packaging technologies. The economic benefits for greater component integration in optical packages are potentially huge given the current packaging approaches in the industry, which is dominated by labour costs of component packages.
- Innovative thermal management technologies - Built-in around these optical modules to be developed is the need for proper thermal management (effective management of heat flux), which is becoming a limiting factor for optimising highly integrated module assemblies. Consequently, novel cooling architectures are needed in photonics at the package/substrate level to manage effectively heat dissipation from varying heat flux components, e.g. electronics components operating at 125°C and to shield/stabilise other temperature sensitive optical elements e.g. thermo-optic filters and laser diodes, which operate at lower temperatures <85°C. In this work, a series of thermal architectures will be investigated based on microchannel and microjet cooling concepts.
For further information on the strand; please contact frank.peters (at) tyndall.ie