Modulators for optical communication

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Demand for higher network bandwidth has been increasing due to applications such as video streaming and cloud computing. This increased demand can be met only by increasing the data rate and the capacity of the data center's interconnects. The conventional copper links suffer from attenuation, dispersion, and crosstalk, which limit their communication speed. To resolve this, copper links are being replaced by optical fibers where manipulated light (representing 0 or 1) is sent from transmitter to the receiver. To increase the optical communication capacity, i.e. number of bits that can be reliably transmitted per second, we plan to use multi-level intensity/phase of light to represent more than one bit per symbol. The purpose of this project is to design modulators that are capable of converting two or more data bits into one symbol, being represented by a multi-level intensity/phase. Design of optical modulators, such as the ones described in this work, enables companies like Ciena to reduce the cost of their communication equipment, as it will allow them to send a higher number of bits over the same optical fiber. Such a design will give Ciena competitive edge in their world-wide presence in the area of packet-optical transport, packet-optical switching, packet networking, optical transport. Given that about half of Ciena's global R and D team reside in Ottawa, this project will be directly beneficial to Ontario and Canada. The outcome of this project will be fully integrated optical modulators along with their behavioral models (in both time domain and frequency domain) and measured results.