This blog is no longer active. I maintained this blog as part of my role of Research Development Officer with the Faculty of Engineering and Computing, DCU. I have taken up a new role, but you can continue to find information on research in the Faculty, through the main Faculty website [HERE], and through the DCU news pages [HERE].
Thanks for reading!
Raymond Kelly

Thursday 12 April 2007

Congratulations to Aisling Clarke

Congratulations to Aisling Clarke who successfully defended her thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Aisling's thesis is "Optical Pulse Processing Towards Tb/s High-Speed Photonic Systems".

She completed her PhD in the Radio & Optical Communications Laboratory at the Research Institute for Networks and Communications Engineering (RINCE) and the School of Electronic Engineering, DCU under the supervision of Professor Liam Barry.

Brief description of Project:
Due to the continued growth of high-bandwidth services provided by the internet, there is a requirement to operate individual line rates in excess of 100 Gb/s in next-generation optical communications systems. In order to implement these high-speed networks, processing of information is required to be carried out optically as electronic processing capability is presently limited to 40 Gb/s. This project focussed on two important sub-systems of an optical communications network, transmitter and wavelength converter. A high-quality pulse source suitable for 80 Gb/s systems was developed and optical techniques were investigated to enhance the quality of the generated pulses (components used include a fibre Bragg grating and saturable absorber). In addition an 80 Gb/s wavelength converter was achieved by exploiting nonlinearities in a semiconductor optical amplifier in conjunction with wavelength shifted filtering. This research will aid in the development of next-generation optical networks, a necessity in today’s society to meet the demands of increased bandwidth at cost-efficient prices.

This project was generously funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and Enterprise Ireland.