By Jaspreet Kaur, Technical Intern, Optii Corp
My first visit to the Institut National de Reserche et Sciences (INRS) was extremely fascinating. INRS campus in downtown Montreal focuses on research in pace with industry and hence bridges the gap between academia and industry. I came to know a lot of people here working in cutting edge industry ready problems. The ambiance at INRS is motivating and fosters research and technological innovation.
At INRS, I am working in collaboration with Professor José Azaña, Research Chair in Ultrafast Photonic Signal Processing on an exciting project to create a novel passive component NOT gate. The project will lead to the fabrication of a “zero energy” component in the fiber-optic logic gate system. This component will help to reduce the cost of signal transmission over millions of distances.
As a technical intern, I am responsible for theoretically modeling, designing and experimentally demonstrating an all-optical logic NOT gate using a purely passive linear process, i.e., linear phase filtering, thus inherently preserving the energy of the processed signal, approaching the “zero-energy” paradigm.
The most exciting part of the project is to collaborate with the great team of Prof. Azana, his postdoctoral researcher Luis Romero Cortes and PhD student Saket Kaushal. They have deep mastery and knowledge about fiber optics communications. It is always interesting to work with people with such expertise.
My first introduction to the topic was through Saket where he walked me through the signal transmission process in the fiber. He diligently explained to me through a presentation the process to convert an optical fiber into a NOT gate using Fiber Bragg Gratings and just manipulating the signal to realize a “zero energy” loss component. This component logic gate will allow it to operate without any external energy contribution.
This collaboration of INRS and Optii Corp. will develop a NOT gate with linear characteristics and will help in significantly boosting the speed of data transmission in Terabytes/second thus over passing the existing technology with Gigabytes/second data rates.
It’s just been my first two weeks here. I am exhilarated about this association with INRS and Optii and cannot wait to accomplish this project’s mission.