Henry R. and Gladys V. Irons Endowed Lectureship
Title: Multifunctional Photonic Signal Processing Platforms for Analog and Digital Signal Processing
Speaker: Dr. Nicholas Madamopoulos, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, The City College of CUNY
Absract: Photonics has been recognized to offer several advantages compared to electronics in signal processing. However, most photonic devices have been focused to provide single functionality. From an engineering and application point of view, reconfigurable and/or programmable platforms, that can provide multiple functionality, can lead to dynamic transformable features, lower cost, scalable manufacturing, and enhanced fabrication reliability. In the recent years, research efforts have been focusing into multifunctional photonic modules. Often, an important device requirement is improved linearity of the photonic device. Recently, linearization techniques of the optical electric field, rather than the optical intensity, have received attention for both analog and digital communication systems, as these systems evolve towards faster speed, higher spectral efficiency, and wider bandwidth environments.
Under the context of multifunctional devices, the lecture will first introduce the current trends in PIC technology and the important PIC building blocks (e.g., waveguides, couplers, Mach-Zehnder Interferometer-MZI) in order to aid the audience in the understanding of the field. Then, two MZI-based multifunctional platforms will be presented for analog and digital signal processing applications. The first one can be configured either as a linear Frequency Discrimination (FD) for phase-modulated direct-detection Microwave Photonic Links (MPLs) or as a linear Electric Field Modulator (LOFM) for multilevel coherent transmitter in digital optical communication systems. The second multifunctional platform can be configured as a tunable/adjustable transfer function optical filter that can address optical and microwave signal filtering and sensor applications.
Biography: Nicholas Madamopoulos received the B.S. degree in Physics (with honors) from the University of Patra, Greece, in 1993 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Optical Science and Engineering from CREOL/College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA in 1996 and 1998, respectively. His Ph.D. specialization was in photonic information processing systems, where he introduced novel photonic delay lines for phased array antenna applications, as well as photonic processing modules for fiber-optic communications.
He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY), since 2007. He has held positions as a Research Associate at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California-Santa Barbara; Sr. Research Engineer for Calient Networks, Inc. (Santa Barbara, CA); Member of Technical Staff for Lucent-Bell Labs, and Sr. Research Scientist for Corning, Inc. He was a visiting faculty at NASA-AMES in the summer of 2009.
Dr. Madamopoulos is a Senior Member of IEEE Photonics Society. He was one of the founding members of the first IEEE-Photonics Society Student chapter (Orlando Chapter) and he served as treasurer and president for several years. He has served as the vice-Chair and Chair of the IEEE-Photonics Society Princeton-Central New Jersey Section. He is a reviewer for IEEE, OSA, Elsevier publications and he has served as General Conference Chair, Technical Program Chair, Technical Program Committee of several conferences. He received a New Focus Student Essay Prize in 1996, the SPIE Educational Scholarship in Optical Engineering in 1997, the UCF Graduate Merit Fellowship Award in 1998 and the New Focus/Optical Society of America (OSA) Student Award in 1998.